PANDA: Pop-up ambient noise data acquisition system: A rapidly deployable, self-recovering shallow water acquisition platform

Abstract

The increasing need for shallow water environmental monitoring requires extensive data collection in areas often encumbered with heavy vessel traffic and other conflicting activities. Conventional surface-expression moorings require relatively bulky buoyancy elements with correspondingly heavy deadweights to maintain placement against currents and surface wave drag. They are expensive, heavy, require considerable resources to deploy and recover, and are vulnerable since their surface expression may attract undesirable human attention, unintended snagging/recovery and/or collateral damage from other marine activities, especially in coastal areas. Conventional bottom-mounted subsurface systems can overcome some of the concerns with reduced component size, but they still consist of multiple physical components and are not well suited for deployment from small vessels with limited manpower. A low-cost system that is small, light, simple to operate and deployable from small vessels by only two persons would be a beneficial tool for shallow water surveys. A number of such systems could be rapidly deployed and recovered to cover a large area of interest. The Acoustic Research Laboratory (ARL) of the Tropical Marine Science Institute at the National University of Singapore has developed and enhanced such a portable data acquisition platform: a pop-up ambient noise data acquisition (PANDA) system for shallow water applications that acquires data for up to a couple of months depending on system set-up. It has no surface expression and leaves nothing on the seabed after recovery, providing a system that is ecologically friendly and unobtrusive.