Developing a portable and persistent autonomous real-time marine mammal acoustic monitor

Current methods for acoustically monitoring marine mammal habitats to mitigate against potential disruptions are compromised in their effectiveness due to non-real-time analysis, such as with archival recorders, or high system noise, such as with towed hydrophone arrays used with seismic surveys. To realize the advantages of both archival and real-time analysis systems, we are developing a portable and autonomous system for acquiring and analyzing towed hydrophone array data in real-time, by combining archival recording hardware, signal detection firmware, and high-bandwidth satellite communication onto a solar- and wave-powered glider platform. Such a system would be capable of persistent, autonomous, real-time monitoring of marine mammals in areas that would otherwise not be surveyed, as it will not require a local ship for its deployment, its retrieval, or reception of data for human review. This paper describes the ongoing development work to demonstrate the feasibility of integrating a WaveGlider with the archival recording electronics and a towed four-element hydrophone array to capture and output acoustic data to an on-ship data collection system.