Jaewon Saw presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting on December 12th, 2024 in Washington D.C., where she shared research on “Shallow water deployment of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) for whale vocalization monitoring in Monterey Bay, California.”
This work (in collaboration with Linqing Luo, Kristy Chu, John Ryan, John Joseph, Kenichi Soga, and Yuxin Wu), presented results from a DAS deployment aboard a boat in Monterey Bay, where a fiber optic cable was lowered using a weighted and suspended mooring line, enabling vertical deployment. Humpback whale vocalizations were captured and identified in the DAS data, noise sources were identified, and DAS data were compared to audio captured by a standalone hydrophone attached to the mooring line and a nearby hydrophone on a cabled observatory. The study demonstrated that DAS could record humpback whale songs in noisy, engineered environments like those found in Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) installations, where monitoring environmental impact on marine wildlife is critical. Ongoing work validates DAS performance with co-deployed traditional hydrophones, develops more robust noise removal techniques, and automates whale vocalization detection to enable real-time monitoring.
This study has been published in Seismological Research Letters, in a Focus Section for Advances in Ocean Monitoring: Saw, J., L. Luo, K. Chu, J. Ryan, K. Soga, and Y. Wu (2025). Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Whale Vocalization Monitoring: A Vertical Deployment Field Test, Seismol. Res. Lett. 96, 801–815, doi: 10.1785/0220240389.
