FA2023

THE OCEANSOUNDMODEL: A GUI FOR SHIPPING NOISE PREDICTIONS

O.C. Rodríguez, S.M. Jesus, H. Chognot and L.O. Júnior
LARSyS, University of Algarve, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal

Comments: download (pdf).
Ref.: Forum Acusticum and EURONOISE, Malaga (Spain), May 2025.

Abstract
The TRIDENT project is a European initiative, that aims at the development of technological capabilities for deep sea monitoring of exploration activities. A particular goal of the project is the development of a computational tool for the prediction of acoustic noise levels generated by such activities, that would include also shipping and wind noise. A fundamental support of acoustic predictions is the development of a graphical user interface (GUI), called the OceanSoundModel, that will seamlessly integrate the different types of input data and will also deal with the different time and space scales of the data. While the development of a specific model describing the acoustic noise created by exploration activities is still underway the OceanSoundModel in its current stage is already able to produce noise maps for wind and shipping noise. The discussion presented here describes and showcases the OceanSoundModel, and presents acoustic maps associated with AIS data acquired during the TRIDENT Baseline Survey 2024, that took place near the Tropic Seamount; these maps were able to provide clear guidelines for the identification of silent and noisy ships, as well as revealed important shadow effects of noise levels induced by bathymetric features.