| Summary: | Progress Code: completed Statement: This dataset contains raw and processed data that were obtained and corrected during the 2017 Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition. No post-processing or quality control of data has occurred other than what took place at sea. Only minor problems were encountered during data collection for this project. The main problems encountered included sonobuoy failures and software crashes. Crashes in the analysis software PAMGuard only occurred once every two to three days, and generally outside of listening stations, and thus had a minimal impact on data collection. The failure rate of sonobuoys was considerably lower than on previous voyages. The weather rarely hampered our listening effort although some recording opportunities were lost on leg 3 during severe gales. While marine science stations and island stopovers provided opportunities to obtain longer duration listening stations than those during transit, ship noise and poor radio reception during some stations and stopovers affected the quality of data. Noise from thrusters was a notable source of loud and frequent intermittent noise at most marine science stations and terrestrial stopovers. In addition to potentially masking marine mammal sounds, thruster noise regularly saturated the recording chain, even when sonobuoys were deployed more than two nautical miles from the station. The relatively short radio reception range of the omnidirectional antenna further confounded this issue, by restricting the reception of sonobuoys to distances less than 5 nmi, where thruster noise was often still prevalent. However, stations and stopovers comprised only a small portion of the listening stations. Purpose The 2016/17 Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE), conducted by the newly-created Swiss Polar Institute, took place from 20 December 2016 – 19 March 2017, aboard the Russian icebreaker RV Akademik Treshnikov. Scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division conducted acoustic monitoring for marine mammals during Legs 2 and ...
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