Global ocean soundscapes

There has been increasing interest in understanding the effects of human-induced noise on the marine environment. Under a variety of programs around the world, researchers are modeling “soundscapes” that depict the undersea sound fields in localized areas such as national exclusive economic zones (EEZs). In this work, we develop techniques for modeling soundscapes on a truly global scale and present as an example world maps of ship noise. The resulting soundscapes compose a database for global shipping noise. The noise due to such shipping can travel very long distances producing sort of a background haze for localized modeling in the EEZs.