 The amount of time it takes for the sound waves to bounce off the seabed and return to a receiver is used to determine water depth.Unlike other sonars, multibeam systems use beamforming to extract directional information from the returning soundwaves, producing a swath of depth readings from a single ping.Multibeam sonar sounding systems, also known as "swathe" (British English) or "swath" (American English), originated for military applications.