The Effects of Sound on the Marine Environment
Abstract
Concern has increased about the role of man-made noise in the marine environment. To address this, ONR has supported the development of the Effects of Sound on the Marine Environment (ESME) workbench. The initial Graphical User Interface was developed by NRL using Matlab with calls to FORTRAN implementations of acoustic propagation models. The acoustic modeling tools are mostly drawn from ONR's Ocean Acoustic Library, which provides the latest open source R&D models. ESME has emerged as the navy standard for such modeling. Its open source and peer-reviewed approach are seen as very favorable. In addition, ESME has emphasized the need for the highest quality results taking advantage of state-of-the-art propagation models and marine-mammal movement models. The latter led to an 'animat' construction that simulates the motion of individual marine mammals as they move through the sound field, and respond with aversion behaviors. The Navy has adopted ESME now as an operational tool. Much work is needed to rapidly bring it to that level, which is the key goal of the work reported here. We are developing a shipping noise simulator that incorporates temporal, spatial, and frequency dependent variables to be used as a predictive ESME tool or a Navy exercise-planning tool. Our approach involves pre-computing frequency and range-dependent transmission losses from a grid of virtual sources (0 dB source level) using coherent BELLHOP runs on a specified number of radial lines.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA541830
Entities
People
- Michael B. Porter
Organizations
- HLS Research (United States)