The Gaussian noise assumption is usually made for slowly time-varying underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) systems, which is entirely adequate for most cases. However, certain human activities such as geophysical surveys, multi-beam echosounders and iceberg breakup generate impulsive noise. Consequently, the impulsive noise degrades the designed receiver based on the Gaussian noise model significantly. An optimization formulation which takes the slowly time-varying channel impulse response (CIR), the group-spa…