Tracking fin whales in the northeast Pacific Ocean with a seafloor seismic network

J Acoust Soc Am. 2012 Oct;132(4):2408-19. doi: 10.1121/1.4747017.

Abstract

Ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) networks represent a tool of opportunity to study fin and blue whales. A small OBS network on the Juan de Fuca Ridge in the northeast Pacific Ocean in ~2.3 km of water recorded an extensive data set of 20-Hz fin whale calls. An automated method has been developed to identify arrival times based on instantaneous frequency and amplitude and to locate calls using a grid search even in the presence of a few bad arrival times. When only one whale is calling near the network, tracks can generally be obtained up to distances of ~15 km from the network. When the calls from multiple whales overlap, user supervision is required to identify tracks. The absolute and relative amplitudes of arrivals and their three-component particle motions provide additional constraints on call location but are not useful for extending the distance to which calls can be located. The double-difference method inverts for changes in relative call locations using differences in residuals for pairs of nearby calls recorded on a common station. The method significantly reduces the unsystematic component of the location error, especially when inconsistencies in arrival time observations are minimized by cross-correlation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Acoustics* / instrumentation
  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Environmental Monitoring / instrumentation
  • Environmental Monitoring / methods*
  • Fin Whale / physiology*
  • Geologic Sediments*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Motion
  • Pacific Ocean
  • Population Density
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Sound Spectrography
  • Sound*
  • Time Factors
  • Vocalization, Animal*
  • Water*

Substances

  • Water