aubellhop 0.1.4

Bellhop underwater acoustic propagation model

The BELLHOP underwater acoustics ray tracing tool

Installation

You can (hopefully) install bellhop with pre-compiled binaries:

pip install bellhop

This includes pre-built Fortran executables for Linux, macOS, and Windows, so you don't need to compile anything yourself.

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

• Main Bellhop documentation
• bellhop.py tutorials
• Python API documentation
• Github repository link

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 arlpy has been superceded by a Julia wrapper by the same author within UnderwaterAcoustics.jl.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 Adelaide University, Australia
Copyright (C) 2021-2025 The Regents of the University of California Marine Physical Lab at Scripps Oceanography, c/o Jules Jaffe, [e-mail]
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/.