Strawman outline for a standard on the use of passive acoustic towed arrays for marine mammal monitoring and mitigation

Abstract

There is a perceived need from several U.S. federal agencies and departments to develop consistent standards for how passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for marine mammals is implemented for mitigation and regulatory monitoring purposes. The use of towed array technology is already being required for geophysical exploration activities in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. However, to date no specific standards have been developed or implemented for towed arrays. Here, a strawman outline for a ANSI standard is presented (http://wp.me/P4j34t-a) to cover requirements and recommendations for the following aspects of towed array operations: initial planning (including guidelines for when PAM is not appropriate), hardware, software, and operator training requirements, real-time mitigation and monitoring procedures, and required steps for performance validation. The outline scope, at present, does not cover operational shutdown decision criteria, sound source verification, or defining the required detection range of the system. Instead of specifying details of towed array systems, the current strategy is to focus on the process of defining the required system performance for a given application, and then stepping through how the system hardware, software, and operations should be selected and validated to meet or exceed these requirements. [Work supported by BSEE.]