Research Document - 2009/068
Passive acoustic monitoring during seismic surveys
By Y. Simard
Abstract
The possibility of using passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) to detect marine mammals in the exclusion zone around the airgun array during seismic surveys is explored for the range of sounds produced by marine mammals and the ambient noise conditions during the survey. The probability of detection with a towed hydrophone array is estimated for representative mysticete and odontocete sounds, using published source levels, propagation losses, shipping noise and seismic pulse levels in the corresponding frequency band. This investigation shows that the efficiency of such PAM approach during seismic survey is severely constrained by the high noise levels at the hydrophones. As expected, this is mostly affecting the low-frequency sounds and infrasounds. However, when the airguns are not active, the detection ranges of the tested sounds always exceeded a safety radius of 500 m, assuming ideal conditions, which may not always materialise. During the firing of the airguns, this was not the case.
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