AUBELLHOP: underwater acoustics ray tracing

Installation and demo

You can (hopefully) install aubellhop with pre-compiled binaries included straight from PyPI. This short script will create a demo folder, install aubellhop using uv, and then run the demo function:

dir=bellhop-example && mkdir -p "$dir" && cd "$dir"
uv init --bare
uv add aubellhop
uv run python -c "import aubellhop as bh; bh.demo()"

This creates the demo file bellhop_demo.py and runs it. Then to re-run the demo:

uv run bellhop_demo.py

If you use Python with different build/environment setups, the standard approaches should work just fine:

pip install aubellhop

Followed by setting up a virtual environment with venv and so on.

See the compilation and installation guide for building from source if you wish to edit the code or the prebuilt binaries don't work for you.

Documentation

• Bellhop documentation
• aubellhop tutorials
• Python API documentation
• Changelog
• Github package repository
• PyPi package site

Background

• Bellhop is an underwater acoustics simulator, part of the Acoustics Toolbox by Michael B. Porter and colleagues.

• The Bellhop component of the Acoustics Toolbox has been extracted UCal San Diego to support the multithreaded C++/CUDA version: bellhopcuda. The UCal team also maintain a fork of the Fortran sources with numerical properties and robustness improved and bugs fixed; some of these changes have been back-ported into the Acoustics Toolbox directly but the codebases are no longer identical

• A Python wrapper for Bellhop was previously provided within the arlpy package by Mandar Chitre at the Acoustic Research Laboratory, National University of Singapore. arlpy has been superceded by a Julia wrapper by the same author within UnderwaterAcoustics.jl.

• An alternative Python interface is provided in PYAT by Orlando Camargo Rodríguez.

• This repository, from Adelaide University, Australia, is a subsequent consolidation of several components of these works, with the intention of providing a clean and well-documented repository to provide easier access to the Bellhop code. The main features of the AU work are:

  • Consolidation of code files and build processes with a single set of clean sources
  • Adaptation and extension of the arlpy-based Python wrapper for Bellhop
  • Updated Fortran source code with automated documentation using FORD and lint checking using fortitude
  • Addition of explicit regression and unit test files using pytest
  • Continuous integration through Github for all documentation, linting, test suite, and code coverage
  • PyPI packaging with pre-compiled binaries for easy installation across Linux, macOS, and Windows

Impressum

Copyright (C) 2025-2026 Adelaide University, Australia
Copyright (C) 2021-2025 The Regents of the University of California Marine Physical Lab at Scripps Oceanography, c/o Jules Jaffe, jjaffe@ucsd.edu
Copyright (C) 1983-2024 Michael B. Porter

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.