Autonmous Real-time Marine Mammal Detections

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution


Race Point Mooring Engineering Trial 2013


Platforms

Buoy DMON1 (deployed Sep 24, 2013, recovered Oct 14, 2013)


Study objectives

A moored buoy with a DMON/LFDCS was deployed 2.5 miles northwest of Race Point near Provincetown, Massachusetts, on September 24, 2013 to monitor the occurence of humpback, fin, sei, and right whales in real time over several months. This is the first deployment of the moored DMON/LFDCS buoy system, and our objective is to test the buoy's capabilities and performance. Detection data on this website should be viewed with caution, as the noise characteristics of the moored buoy are not well known. A discussion of the real-time results by Mark Baumgartner is provided in the study chronology below.

Principal Investigators: Mark Baumgartner (WHOI), Dave Fratantoni (WHOI), and Sofie Van Parijs (NOAA NEFSC).

Collaborators: John Kemp of the WHOI Mooring Operations, Engineering and Field Support Group


Questions

Please email Mark Baumgartner at mbaumgartner@whoi.edu. For a general desciption of the detection system and the autonomous platforms, visit dcs.whoi.edu.


Study chronology

Sep 24

The moored buoy (DMON1) was deployed today at 10:30 am by Kris Newhall and Will Ostrom (WHOI) off Race Point, Massachusetts.

Sep 24-26

The data collection and satellite communication hardware is working only intermittently with large gaps in the transmitted data. We are also noticing significant low-frequency background noise that is correlated with the tides (quiet at slack tide, loud background noise during flood and ebb), suggesting flow noise is the culprit.

Sep 27

The buoy has stopped transmitting data via Iridium satellite. We are waiting to see if the system resets itself.

Oct 1

We have convinced ourselves that the buoy's communication system has failed, so we are planning to recover the mooring soon.

Oct 14

The buoy was recovered today by Will Ostrom (WHOI). The DMON/LFDCS was still operating as expected, but as we suspected, the communication system failed.

Acknowledgements

Engineering support for the moored buoy application of the DMON/LFDCS was provided by WHOI engineers Jon Ware, Leo-Paul Pelletier, and the WHOI ACOMMS group. The buoy was expertly prepared and deployed by Kris Newhall, Will Ostrom, and Jeff Pietro of the WHOI Mooring Operations, Engineering and Field Support Group, and at sea assistance was provided by Ken Houtler (captain) and Ian Hanley (mate) of the R/V Tioga. Support for the development of the moored buoy application of the DMON/LFDCS was provided by the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Advanced Sampling Technologies Working Group. The DMON instrument was developed by Mark Johnson and Tom Hurst at WHOI. Mark Johnson was responsible for developing the application programming interface (API) for the DMON, and coded the initial DMON implementation of the pitch tracking algorithm described in Baumgartner and Mussoline (2011). Support for the development and testing of the DMON/LFDCS was provided by the Office of Naval Research and the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Advanced Sampling Technologies Working Group. NOAA funding was provided through the Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region.


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