Monitoring long term ocean noise in European waters

The European AQUO project started in October 2012, in the scope of the FP7 European Research Framework, for three years duration. The final goal is to provide policy makers with practical guidelines and solutions, in order to mitigate underwater noise footprint due to noise radiation from ships. In the framework of the AQUO project, real-time monitoring of shipping noise has been implemented in three areas across European waters. The monitoring system is composed of (a) acoustic observatories, deployed permanently, which continuously measure the ambient noise, (b) real-time acoustic embedded processing which continuously estimate noise in third octave bands, (c) real-time modeling which predict three dimensional noise field at large scale, (d) real-time acoustic data assimilation processing which calibrate the modeling output to provide noise map, (e) statistical processing which provide monthly and annual averages in order to evaluate trends of the ambient noise at the scale of a basin. These services are operational. Results for the AQUO test sites are made available in real-time through a web access which will be demonstrated.