Passive Acoustic Tracking of Minke Whales

• Main Author: Nosal, Eva-Marie
• Other Authors: HAWAII UNIV HONOLULU
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Biology; Acoustics; *HYDROPHONES; *WHALES; *ACOUSTIC TRACKING; ANIMALS; ACOUSTIC DATA; ACOUSTIC VELOCITY; ACCURACY; PASSIVE SYSTEMS; POSITION(LOCATION); MINKE WHALE; minke whale
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA535209; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA535209

This project developed model-based 3D passive acoustic tracking methods for minke whales. It was conducted in support of ONR Award N000140910489 in which T. Norris (Bio-Waves) conducted visual surveys at PMRF and S. Martin (SPAWAR) collected acoustic data on the PMRF bottom-mounted hydrophones. In this project, these data were analyzed to detect, characterize, and track minke whale calls. A minke boing detector and 3D model-based tracker was implemented. Acoustically derived positions were compared with SPA WAR position estimates (using the MM3 2D time-of-arrival tracking method). The MM3 2D tracker gave similar boing position estimates to the 3D model-based tracker. The localized boings were within the range for which direct paths exit and for which the constant-SSP TOA method (used by MM3 2D) is expected to give reasonable position estimates. The importance of using model-based tracking to get accurate position estimates increases with the range of the animal from the hydrophones, with hydrophone spacing, and with increasing complexity of sound speed profiles.