In this paper, the propagation characteristics due to the horizontal water temperature variations in the sea such as thermal fronts is analyzed by the ray theory. Two models for the temperature anomaly layer are chosen. One is a plane type and the other is a cylindrical type. In the plane type, the temperature increases linearly from a isothermal region to 5km with the gradient of about 2℃./km, and decreases with the same gradient in next 5km. In the cylindrical type, water temperature increases only with the same gradient from a half cylindrical thermal boundary surface. The result showed that the gradient of acoustic rays decreases in the temperature increasing region and vice versa in temperature decreasing region. And, the transmission loss due to the temperature variation was less than O.2dB in the plane type model as well as in the cylindrical one.

The characteristics of the P(VDF-TrFE) acoustic microscope transducer were evaluated theoretically and experimentally by comparison with those of the PVDF and the ZnO acoustic microscope transducers. It was found that its insertion loss was about 5dB lower than that of the PVDF and about 13dB higher than that of the ZnO. And its relative bandwidth was 20% which could produce the effective acoustic pulse waves having about 4 periods duration into water. Another finding was that the effective horizontal focusing resolution and the focal depth were 120μM and 1.5mm, respectively.