Thirty years of progress in applications and modeling of ocean ambient noise

Ambient noise in the ocean is a stochastic process, which traditionally was considered to be a nuisance, since it reduced the detectability of sonar signals of interest. However, over the last thirty years, it has come to be recognized that the ambient noise itself contains useful information about the ocean and ocean processes. To extract the information, various inversion procedures have been developed, based upon which a number of practical applications of the ambient noise have evolved. Since naturally generated ambient noise is always present in the ocean, it has the advantage of being non-invasive and non-damaging to marine life, including marine mammals. In this article, a summary of the commonly encountered ambient noise models is offered, along with the associated inversion procedures, and some of the more recent applications of the ambient noise are highlighted.