Acoustic Seaglider (trademark) for Beaked Whale Detection

This effort exists within a group dedicated to the use of autonomous underwater vehicles, and buoyancy-driven gliders in particular, to support Navy missions. The group generally uses the Seaglider , developed at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington (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 Applied Seaglider itself. This report describes our efforts as part of the ONR Passive Autonomous Acoustic Monitoring (PAAM) program. The 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 year, the long-term goals of the ONR PAAM program have changed somewhat, to concentrate on the DCL mission in support of monitoring of marine mammals, particularly in active Navy operating areas.