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Brief
The URN from marine vessels, is the single ubiquitous source of low frequency ambient noise in the Ocean. The data reveals that the ambient noise in the Oceans due to shipping, have increased at the rate of 3 dB per decade since the 1950s. These are actual sensors positioned to measure low frequency URN. The shipping industry over the years have gone through several iterations in design and manufacturing technology & knowhow, however the noise has somehow not reduced significantly. The shipping industry is the main engine of trade and thus the global economic growth is driven by them. There is a direct relation, between the global trade, in terms of GDP growth to Gross tonnage and corresponding low frequency ambient noise. All the three have seen a steady increase since the pre-Industrial era.
The increasing ambient noise due to anthropogenic activities is a cause of serious concern for sustainable shipping. The marine mammals are extremely dependent on sound for multiple biologically critical functions, like foraging, navigation, communication, finding mates and more. The recent spate of big whale stranding in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and beyond, is a manifestation of the severe acoustic habitat degradation due to increasing URN. The low frequency ambient noise due to URN, suffer least attenuation underwater and thus have impact over a very large area. The acoustic habitat degradation could lead to migration from their habitat, disorientation, depletion of population abundance and even fatalities due to navigation failure.
The URN management will entail a precise appreciation of the spatio-temporal distribution of the low frequency ambient noise and the subsequent source-path-receiver analysis. The Marine Spatial Planning (MSP), is the term used these days to represent the entire management using spatio-temporal mapping. The digital transformation becomes a pre-requisite to build such MSP mechanisms that will aid governance in a big way. The policy interventions can be far more precise and targeted, with such advanced tools that is data driven and provides a real-time appreciation of the underwater domain.
The input for the URN MSP tool would be the shipping data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS). The URN at source will be computed using certain algorithms and then passed through the underwater channel for the specific region. The tropical waters in the IOR are known for their severe fluctuations and significant impact on the source URN. Thus, the underwater channel model has to get real-time inputs on the medium parameters and then a complex algorithm computes the path modification. Then based on the receiver characteristics, we complete the source-path-receiver analysis to generate the MSP and further carry out URN management.
This, project present the entire digital tool to generate the MSP for effective URN management, driven by the larger Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) framework, that provides nuanced policy & technology interventions along with acoustic capacity & capability building.