Dr. Anthony Lyons
Research Professor
University of New Hampshire
Friday, November 21, 2025, 3:10 p.m.
Chase 105
Abstract
Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) is a technique that uses the motion of a platform, such as an autonomous underwater vehicle or towed system, to synthetically create a much larger aperture than that of the physical array. By coherently combining returns from many pings along the vehicle’s track, SAS achieves much higher along-track resolution than conventional side-scan sonar. The centimeter-scale resolution images produced by SAS have typically only been used for detecting and classifying objects on the seafloor or, more rarely, for use in underwater archaeology. The systems have not been used to date to make quantitative oceanographic measurements. In this talk I’ll give a few examples of ways that SAS technology could be used for making more quantitative measurements of physical and biological ocean processes (but I’m not going to spoil things by telling you what those specific examples are – you’ll just have to come to the talk to find out).
Bio
Dr. Anthony Lyons is currently a Research Professor in the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping and is the Associate Director for Research in the Center for Acoustics Research and Education. He received his B.S. degree in Physics, summa cum laude, from Henderson State University, Arkadelphia, AR, in 1988. After receiving his PhD in Oceanography from Texas A&M University in 1995, Dr. Lyons worked in the Fine-Scale Acoustics and Oceanography Group at the SACLANT Undersea Research Centre, La Spezia, Italy, until 2000 where he was involved in a variety of projects in environmental acoustics and oceanography. Before taking his position at the University of New Hampshire, Dr. Lyons was a Senior Scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State and a Professor of Acoustics in Penn State’s Graduate Program in Acoustics (2000 - 2014). While on sabbatical, he worked in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2008. Dr. Lyons also worked for the US Office of Naval Research Global as an Associate Director in 2008 and 2014 and was a Visiting Scientist at the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, La Spezia, Italy in 2023. His research projects have included studies of shallow-water acoustic propagation, acoustic interaction with the seafloor, characterization of seafloor sediments and high-resolution oceanographic measurements. Dr. Lyons was awarded, with the recommendation of the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Acoustics' (U.K.) A.B. Wood Medal in 2003. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (2007) and a member of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society.
