intent of the invention to improve the precision and accuracy of the calibration result by accounting for the field components that are present despite the absence of information needed to develop a deterministic physical model of the acoustic field the data channels of a hydrophone line array may number in the hundreds the data required to compute the ffvs of these channels are collected simultaneously the method begins with the generation of a signal with the properties of continuous broadband gaussian noise the signal is amplified and transmitted into the water by an acoustic projector such that the statistics of the acoustic field in the volume of water occupied by the measurement equipment are stationary data provided by a plurality of calibrated reference standard hydrophones are processed using standard signal processing techniques to estimate the acoustic transfer functions between one of the reference standard hydrophones designated as the principle reference and all other reference standard hydrophones designated as auxiliary references the acoustic transfer function h pn between the principle reference p and the n th reference located at azimuth angle u03b8 n and vertical displacement z n is given as the ratio of the cross spectrum p np and the autospectrum p pp of the principle reference as shown in equation 1 frequency dependent complex acosutic transfer functions computed using equation 1 are then interpolated over the domain of azimuth u03b8 and vertical displacement z that is occupied by the calibrated reference standard hydrophones on a frequency by frequency basis the result is a purely empirical.