Stable, Towed, Volumetric Hydrophone Array

Detecting the presence of marine mammals is paramount in lessening man’s impact on the environment as we search the oceans for natural resources. Most human operations in oceans use high powered acoustic sources that can disturb, disrupt, main or kill marine mammals. The ability to detect, identify and locate marine mammals is critical during these operations to mitigate harm. Passive acoustics has been found to be a highly reliable method to detect marine mammals but work is required to improve the process of locating them and decrease the system cost. There is significant literature on detection of marine mammals but little is available on systems that can determine bearing and range especially over the broad spectrum of marine mammal phonation. Such systems exist in expensive military hardware but low cost methods are required due to the economics that drive marine mammal detection. Low noise and highly sensitive systems are required to detect and locate marine mammals at the farthest range possible thus providing the widest coverage. The government has imposed regulations requiring marine mammal detection when ocean operations may harm the animals, so there is a significant need for low cost, real-time, high performance, reliable, towed passive acoustic system.