Techniques for modeling ocean soundscapes: Detailed description for wind contributionsa).

Wind over the ocean creates breaking waves that generate air-filled bubbles, which radiate underwater sound. This wind-generated sound is a significant component of the ocean soundscape, and models are essential for understanding and predicting its impact. Models for predicting sound pressure level (SPL) from wind have been studied for many years.

Verifying models of the underwater soundscape from wind and ships with benchmark scenariosa).

Models of the underwater acoustic soundscape are important for evaluating the effects of human generated sounds on marine life. The performance of models can be validated against measurements or verified against each other for consistency. A verification workshop was held to compare models that predict the soundscape from wind and vessels and estimate detection ranges for a submerged target.

On the limits of distinguishing seabed types via ambient acoustic sound.

This article presents a theoretical analysis of optimally distinguishing among environmental parameters from ocean ambient sound. Recent approaches to this problem either focus on parameter estimation or attempt to classify the environment into one of many known types through machine learning. This classification problem is framed as one of hypothesis testing on the received ambient sound snapshots.

Optimal environmental estimation with ocean ambient noise.

This article presents an asymptotically optimal technique for estimating environmental parameters from ocean ambient noise. Noise from wind and breaking waves propagates through the water column and reflects off the bottom over a wide range of angles and frequencies and, in doing so, imparts information about the environment to the noise covariance matrix for a receiver array. Most environmental estimation techniques focus on spatial filtering methods aimed at recovering the vertical noise directionality.

Environmental information content of ocean ambient noise.

In recent years, methods have been developed to estimate a variety of environmental parameters based on measurements of the ocean ambient noise. For example, noise has been used to estimate water depth using the passive fathometer technique and bottom loss estimated and used to invert for seabed parameters. There is also information in the noise about the water column sound speed, volume attenuation, and the sea-state.