Modern approaches to ocean soundscape modeling

With the ability of acoustic energy to travel to great distances in the ocean, the local environmental soundscape can be quite complex. Study of the acoustics ecological environment has been going on for decades, historically led by navy needs of understanding the performance of submarine finding technology. This analysis was always considered noise modeling, as all sounds other than a submarine were considered "noise". Recent understanding of the possible impacts of sound on the specific marine fauna has led to a broad resurgence in interest in the nature and quality of the ocean ambient sound. With the advent of satellite remote sampling, high resolution ocean and atmospheric forecasts and high speed, high fidelity acoustic models, the opportunity exists to generate 4 dimensional (location, time and frequency) directional noise maps. Examples of these and a methodology for real-tie soundscape modeling will be presenting.