Monitoring long term ocean noise in European waters

A decade of underwater noise research in support of the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive

“…Progress on monitoring of continuous noise pollution has been comparatively slow due to the upfront costs of at-sea measurements and the high level of expertise and international coordination required to produce validated maps of D11.2 at the regional scale. Nevertheless, regional maps of this indicator have already been produced for the Baltic (Folegot et al, 2016), North Sea (Kinneging and Tougaard, 2021) and wider NE Atlantic (Farcas et al, 2020). Similar efforts are needed in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, where cost savings can be made by building on the lessons learned in Northern Europe.…”

“…The first regional joint monitoring programme for D11.2 was undertaken in the Baltic Sea under the Baltic Sea Information on the Acoustic Soundscape (BIAS) project (Sigray et al, 2016), which ran from 2012 to 2016. The programme carried out field monitoring at 36 sites throughout the Baltic Sea during 2014 (Mustonen et al, 2019), and produced modelled maps of shipping noise at 63 Hz, 125 Hz, and 2 kHz (Folegot et al, 2016). Processed monitoring data and shipping noise maps from BIAS are held in a public database hosted by ICES, similar to the ICES impulsive noise registry (see Section 3.1).…”

Review of Research Results Concerning the Modelling of Shipping Noise

“…On the basis of SL empirical models, Hamson [60], Etter [61], Anon [62], Courtois [63], Colin [64], Audoly [65], Aulanier [66], Jones [67], Folegot [68], Soares [69], Erbe [70], Sertlek [71], and Buszman [72,73], devoted studies to the noise field produced by merchant ships in specific sea areas. Ainslie [35] and Carey [9] introduced the noise mapping of merchants ships in Principles of Sonar Performance Modelling and Ocean Ambient Noise Measurement and Theory, respectively.…”

Monitoring Anthropogenic Ocean Sound from Shipping Using an Acoustic Sensor Network and a Compressive Sensing Approach

“…It makes use of a network of acoustic sensors at a set of discrete locations within the region of interest to record values of the sound produced by all sources (whether their locations are known or not). Recently, however, there has been interest in an approach that uses a combination of modelling and measurement [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. In this paper consideration is given to how such an approach might be implemented using a method based on compressive sensing.…”

“…Instead, the source spectrum is evaluated at the centre frequencies of third-octave bands in the frequency interval from 40 Hz to 200 Hz [ 27 ], and is plotted in Figure 1 . This simplification is appropriate for noise mapping for environmental impact assessment and is required in order to make the noise mapping practical [ 19 , 28 ]. Note that the methodology used for the numerical simulation experiments described here does not depend critically on the source model used, and a more sophisticated model may be used once a consensus is achieved on the most accurate model (this may be tractable in the future since AIS transponder data often contains information about the ship class, size and speed).…”