CCS - MV Bluefin 2017 V01 Bioacoustics

Full description

This bio-acoustic data was collected during a December 2017 voyage on the Australian Maritime College training vessel MV Bluefin as part of the Carbon Capture and Storage project. The survey was conducted in the nearshore of the Gippsland region. See voyage report MV Bluefin 201701 Voyage Summary.docx for detailed overview of the voyage.

Four frequency bio-acoustic water column and seafloor backscatter.

Simrad 38 kHz and 120 kHz echosounders are part of the Bluefin’s installed instrument suite. The 70 and 200 kHz echosounders are a temporary installation for this voyage. The transducers were mounted in a custom flange attached to the bottom of the vessel. 30 m transducer extension cables connect to the topside Simrad WBT Tube transceiver. Data was acquired using Simrad EK80 Version 1.12 software logging at EK60 resolution. Acoustic data was recorded in local time. Ship’s GPS was embedded in the acoustic data files for most of the voyage but some gaps occurred due to software issues. Ascii gps files at 1 and 10 second intervals are available that cover the duration of the voyage. GPS is also embedded in the multibeam data as a redundant source.

Echosounder details:

Echosounder | Frequency | Mode | Transceiver Serial no | Transducer Model & serial No | Comments

Simrad EK60 | 38 kHz | CW | | ES38B, SN30333 | Using CSIRO EK60 GPT on loan as MV Bluefin GPT was faulty.

Simrad EK60 | 120 kHz | CW | | ES120-7C, Xxxxx |

Simrad WBT Tube | 70 kHz | CW | 253692 | ES70-CD, 121 |

Simrad WBT Tube | 200 kHz | CW | 253687 | ES200-CDK |

Survey settings:

Frequency (kHz) | Power | Pulse duration (ms) | Logging Range (m)

38 | 200* | 1.024 | 60

70 | 100* | 1.024 | 60

120 | 250 | 1.024 | 60

200 | 105 | 1.024 | 60

*Note, calibration was carried out at 2000 W and 500 W for 38 and 70 kHz respectively. Follow up work is planned to like the higher powered calibration data to the lower powered field settings

Calibration Information:

Bio-acoustic system was calibrated using the standard sphere method for survey settings on 6th of December 2017 at Beauty Point. See separate calibration report for details

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