Optimizing passive acoustic systems for marine mammal detection and localization: Application to real-time monitoring north Atlantic right whales in Gulf of St. Lawrence

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of determining optimal design of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) systems for detecting and localizing whale calls in real-time in variable-noise environments. The performance of various PAM system is assessed using the detection theory and simulation modeling applied to the context of North Atlantic right whale (NARW) upcalls in feeding grounds and noisy shipping corridor of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Realistic simulations are performed using an estimated NARW upcall source level (SL), the actual shipping traffic, measured local fleet ship SLs, and transmission loss (TL) from a regional 2.5-D propagation model accounting for the bathymetric and environmental structures. The comparisons consider single-hydrophone and hydrophone-array PAM systems, mounted on buoys, gliders, or cabled to shore and three families of NARW upcall detectors. The targeted performance is a low false-alarm rate of 1 per day and a detection probability > 0.5. The time-frequency-based detector offers the best trade-off between detection performance and robustness against NARW upcall variability. The effective detection ranges are ∼ 15 times lower with single-hydrophone systems compared to hydrophone-arrays, whose beamforming enhances the signal in the upcall direction while damping interfering discrete noise from nearby transiting ships in other directions. Detecting and localizing NARWs in the large target areas (>10000-km2 scale) is possible with a few well-located arrays of 10–20 hydrophones, which appears as the optimal cost/performance trade-off.