An homage to Bill Kuperman’s wizardry: Turning noise into signal

Bill Kuperman’s contributions to the field of underwater acoustics have been numerous and tremendous. I would like to share some memories of my time working with Bill starting in 2003 as a Postdoc under his mentoring at the Marine Physical Laboratory (Scripps Institute of Oceanography, UC San Diego). At that time, Bill was investigating the use of coherent processing of ocean and seismic ambient noise as a novel means to perform passive remote sensing, i.e., without using conventional active sources. Bill’s intuition, charisma, leadership, scholarly experience, and constant encouragement to explore new research avenues created a unique work environment at the Marine Physical Laboratory, which I greatly benefited from, and I am most grateful for.