Dispersion and attenuation of guided waves in the Arctic Ocean with viscoelastic ice layer.

This article focuses on applying the spectral method to analyze the complex dispersion and attenuation characteristics of guided acoustic waves in a viscoelastic ice–water–sediment–seafloor coupled system modeling the Arctic Ocean environment. The study formulates the wave equations and boundary conditions into a generalized eigenvalue problem using Chebyshev and Laguerre orthogonal polynomials for discretization, enabling efficient and accurate numerical computation of dispersion and attenuation curves. Numerical results demonstrate that ice layer damping properties have a more significant impact on guided-wave attenuation than ice thickness, with the first-order mode exhibiting notably higher attenuation that increases monotonically with frequency, while higher-order modes show frequency-selective attenuation patterns influenced by seawater depth. The spectral method is shown to outperform traditional numerical techniques in efficiency, accuracy, and coding simplicity, offering valuable theoretical guidance for Arctic acoustic detection, navigation, and communication despite the model’s simplifications relative to the actual Arctic environment.