By Air and by Sea
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Roberto Racca, JASCO’s Chief Communications Officer, contributed a feature article entitled By Air and by Sea – Novel Mobile Platforms Bring Acoustic Monitoring to Offshore Wind Farms to the May issue of Ocean News & Technology magazine. The issue focuses on technology related to the development of marine renewables, and the feature article gives a panoramic on new mobile platforms apt to be equipped with acoustic monitoring instruments to both detect the presence of vocalizing marine animals and assess their exposure to noise from construction and operation of offshore wind farms.
From the article:
The construction and operation of offshore wind farms carries regulatory requirements for acoustic monitoring of both noise emissions from the activity and marine mammals’ vocalizations. The latter reveal the presence of animals that could be at risk from noise exposure or collision with service ships. Such requirements call for innovative monitoring technologies capable of rapid deployment, efficient relocation, and wide area coverage. Autonomous marine vehicles equipped with advanced acoustic receptors, on-board processing, and long-range telemetry are the clear future of this sector. Viable carrier designs include underwater, surface, and even airborne vehicles with water landing capacity; any of these can deploy a single or several hydrophones to sample sound levels in the water.
The range of options offered by mobile platform technologies to deliver rapidly targetable monitoring solutions for ocean wind projects is considerable, and still expanding as current and new players bring advances to the field. By designing [an acoustic and oceanographic sensor system] compatible with a wide selection of carrier types, JASCO aims at providing a consistent, high-performance data acquisition and processing framework across the technology spectrum. The choice of optimal sensor deployment platforms for a particular project can then be driven primarily, and rightly so, by operational considerations.
In his Editor’s Note headlining the May issue, Ed Freeman highlighted the need for multidisciplinary collaboration required to ensure the effective and environmentally sustainable development of marine renewables. He acknowledged the leadership of players in the sector who by contributing their insight to the magazine are helping spread the necessary knowledge and good practices:
Interest in marine renewable energy has never been greater, with unprecedented levels of capital investment being poured into offshore wind, tidal, and wave energy projects across the globe. But fueling this transition will not be easy.
It will take the experience and knowhow of offshore wind pioneers like Ørsted to plan, construct, and manage wind farms on a never-before-seen scale. It will take the engineering might of subsea tech developers like EC-OG to tackle the challenges of energy storage. It will take the ingenuity of infrastructure manufacturers like Acteon to design innovative end-to-end solutions for marine energy developers. It will take first-rate test and evaluation faculties like those managed by Ohmsett to advance technologies through rigorous R&D. It will take the dedicated stewardship of scientific experts like JASCO Applied Sciences to measure the environmental impacts of offshore activities.
Read the full article or browse the entire May issue of Ocean News & Technology.
