Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) field trial during two wide-azimuth geophysical surveys

摘要

Only through increased industry experience in the field can PAM capabilities and limitations be fully understood and improved. Additional PAM trials on commercial seismic surveys are crucial to further the development of acoustic monitoring and the ability to rapidly localize marine mammals. Additional work is also needed to understand detection distances and the likelihood of detecting certain kinds of marine mammals, such as bowhead whales, that are currently considered difficult to detect. In a multivessel environment, multiple exclusion zones can be centrally monitored if there is a reliable telemetry link. The ability to centrally conduct acoustic monitoring may reduce staffing levels on wide-azimuth seismic operations by eliminating the need for multiple PAM operators in a fleet. Centralized monitoring also increases the chances for localization from multives-sel detections and promotes monitoring standardization. Additional testing can determine the range limitations of existing telemetry systems and possibly further the development of more sophisticated telemetry links. Also, additional testing of telemetry methods for the transfer of visual and acoustic data between vessels should be pursued. At present, the centralized system requires manual interpretation of bearing data of animals from different vessels, but further development will allow this data to be fully incorporated into an automated method to localize vocalizing animals by triangulation.