Weird Data: The Element of Surprise in Underwater Acoustic Sensing

The commonality between a boat’s depth sounder and those mysterious sounds you hear when you dive beneath the waves is underwater acoustics, a field in which even the most experienced practitioners struggle with understanding all of the many sources of interference, noise, and changing physics needed for data interpretation. Users of ocean acoustic instruments don’t control whale calls, shipping, snapping shrimp distribution, fish finders on other vessels, nesting creatures, or pile driving and cannot predict ahead of time all of the possible sources of interference in acoustic data. The complexity of underwater acoustic systems provides further challenges; is that unexpected signal a new source in the environment, a potential signal of interest, or system noise?