1. It has been some time since I sent out a DRI Update. During the intervening period many of us involved in SAX99 measurements have completed papers for the IEEE-OE (Oceanic Engineering) Special Issue on HF sediment acoustics and associated sediment properties and processes. Mike Richardson and I are the guest editors for this Special Issue, and it contains 13 articles related to SAX99 and 6 additional articles by other investigators that cover similar topics. The Special Issue should appear in mid September, i.e., any day now, though it is technically the July issue. Hopefully, the Special Issue will provide a reader with a useful summary of the main technical results from SAX99. I believe Mike and I will acquire a limited number of copies of the Special Issue. There can be no promises, but if you wish to obtain a copy, let me know and I will see what we can do.
2. There will be one final DRI-related event: a special session at the spring ASA meeting in Nashville (28 April - 2 May, 2003), titled "High-frequency sediment acoustics and associated sediment properties and processes." This will be a good opportunity to report on final SAX99 results. I will send out a reminder about this special session as the time for abstract submission approaches.
3. Following SAX99, our group at APL-UW has been continuing to collaborate with investigators at CSS on work related to the detection of buried targets with synthetic aperture sonar. FYI, the results of some of this work will be reported in two papers at the Oceans 2002 meeting in Biloxi, MS (29-31 October). One paper ("Shallow grazing angle sonar detection of targets buried under a rippled interface" by J. L. Lopes et al.) describes controlled experiments in a test pond in which subcritical buried target detections were made via scattering from ripples on sandy sediment. The other paper ("Remote sensing of sand ripples using high-frequency backscatter" by D. Tang et al.) describes progress in using high-frequency backscatter to infer ripple height in addition to ripple wavelength. These papers will appear in the Oceans 2002 proceedings.