Early and Late Time Acoustic Measures for Underwater Seismic Airgun Signals In Long-Term Acoustic Data Sets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive acoustic feature toolkit for analyzing underwater seismic airgun signals, capturing both early pulse and late reverberation phases, demonstrated on extensive Greenland deployment data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel toolkit that extracts 183 features from underwater seismic signals, enabling detailed analysis of acoustic properties before, during, and after sound events.

Findings

Successful extraction of 147 million data points from field recordings

High performance computing significantly reduces data processing time

Toolkit effectively characterizes acoustic environment around seismic events

Abstract

This work presents a new toolkit for describing the acoustic properties of the ocean environment before, during and after a sound event caused by an underwater seismic air-gun. The toolkit uses existing sound measures, but uniquely applies these to capture the early time period (actual pulse) and late time period (reverberation and multiple arrivals). In total, 183 features are produced for each air-gun sound. This toolkit was utilized on data retrieved from a field deployment encompassing five marine autonomous recording units during a 46-day seismic air-gun survey in Baffin Bay, Greenland. Using this toolkit, a total of 147 million data points were identified from the Greenland deployment recordings. The feasibility of extracting a large number of features was then evaluated using two separate methods: a serial computer and a high performance system. Results indicate that data extraction performance took an estimated 216 hours for the serial system, and 18 hours for the high performance computer. This paper provides an analytical description of the new toolkit along with details for using it to identify relevant data.