Comments:pdf
Ref.: Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 10, 1763, 2022
(doi).
Abstract:
Economic globalization and the continuous search for food, energy and raw materials led to
an estimated 3 dB/decade increase of ocean noise intensity. Determining the level of anthropogenic
noise, the so-called excess noise, and building identifiable meaningful indicators for supporting
marine management policies currently requires extensive observation data and computer modeling.
For modeling purposes, in this study, anthropogenic noise was reduced to shipping traffic drawn
from Automatic Identification System data, and environmental sound was attributed to surface wind
only. Data-model comparison allowed introducing a methodology for simple model calibration
and estimate excess noise. This methodology was tested on acoustic recordings performed in June
2018 at three locations to the southwest of Faial-Pico Islands in the Azores archipelago. The results
show that field-calibrated excess noise sound maps are in line with the shipping distribution in the
area, revealing a number of potentially marine life-threatening hotspots. Excess noise addresses the
need for a quantifiable measure of ocean noise only and therefore offers a basis for building suitable
continuous anthropogenic noise pollution indicators