Summary of Acoustics-in-Focus Panel Discussion Special Session “Underwater Sound Modeling: Comprehensive Environmental Descriptions”

This paper summarizes the online panel discussion special session “ Underwater Sound Modeling: Comprehensive Environmental Descriptions ” that took place during the first Acoustics-in-Focus virtual meeting, the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, on June 8, 2021. The session was sponsored by the Underwater Acoustics Technical Committee and consisted of seven panelists, verbal participation by about a dozen other attendees, and attendance by more than 50 additional people. The background slides that were presented, and the discussion, began things by considering the methods used to insert environmental information into acoustical models, mainly computational propagation simulations, but then moved into a broader discussion that included statistical models and inverse methodology.