Passive Autonomous Acoustic Monitoring of Marine Mammals: System Development Using Seaglider (trademark)

A group within the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington (APL-UW) dedicated to the use of autonomous underwater vehicles in support of Navy missions executed this program. The group generally uses the Seaglider, developed at APL-UW, and develops or adapts instruments and glider behavior to support specific mission requirements. This group is informally called the Applied Seaglider Group, whose acronym (ASG) is also used to describe the mission-adapted Seaglider itself. This report describes ongoing efforts as part of the ONR Passive Autonomous Acoustic Monitoring (PAAM) program. The original long-term goals of the PAAM program were as follows. a) Perform persistent and autonomous passive acoustic monitoring of a 500-1000 square nautical mile Navy exercise area for presence of marine mammals. b) Monitor for three weeks prior to, three weeks during, and three weeks after a typical exercise. c) Detect, classify and localize (DCL) vocalizing marine mammals. d) Provide actionable information in a timely manner to the officer in tactical command to support marine mammal mitigation efforts. Over the past several years, the long-term goals of the ONR PAAM program have changed to concentrate on the DCL mission in support of monitoring of marine mammals, particularly in Navy operating areas. In particular, a primary goal is to provide a persistent (many months) marine mammal monitoring capability in Navy operating areas that are remote or difficult to monitor by traditional means. These include the Hawaii, Gulf of Alaska, and Mariana Islands operating areas.