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Frequency hopping (FH) signals have been widely used to improve performance against frequency selective fading phenomenon of underwater channels. However, the channel is slowly varying in regard to changes in weather conditions, and thus the conventional FH detection transmitting signals with fixed frequency cannot guarantee good detection performance in the dynamic underwater environment. To overcome the performance degradation in slowly-varying fading dispersive channels, this paper proposes an adaptive frequency-hopping (AFH) target detection method. Compared with conventional FH detection methods, the AFH can adaptively select the optimal detection frequency based on premeasured background noise and channel frequency response measured from previous experiments. Numerical simulations and lake trials are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the AFH. The simulation results show that the AFH has better detection performance than the conventional FH. The lake trial results have also verified the validity and feasibility of AFH. Importantly, AFH also achieves a better output signal-to-noise ratio under actual noise interference., (© 2024 Acoustical Society of America.)