Placentia Bay is a vital habitat and ecological area that has been identified as an ecologically and biologically significant area (DFO 2017). Placentia Bay is also an important economic area for fisheries and a key sea lane for vessels serving the Come By Chance refinery. The growing maritime traffic in this area is a major source of underwater radiated noise (URN) impacting marine life and the ecosystem. This project aims to collect two different sets of complimentary acoustic and oceanographic data that will add to the baseline understanding of Placentia Bay. A stationary mooring will be deployed to collect information on the soundscape of the region including ambient noise while an underwater glider AUV will be deployed to not only provide ancillary data for ground truthing the acoustic data but provide another data set to fill a spatial gap in oceanographic data.

Historically, similar projects focused on local sound measurements at a fixed location and their assumed interactions with bathymetric features. This work will collect additional glider data that will provide reliable spatial data to understand sound propagation in the ocean environments surrounding the hydrophone.  The combination of the mooring line and glider will provide a unique set of baseline data which will inform on

1. ambient noise in a section of Placentia Bay
2. 3D ocean transmission loss in the same area
3. the spatial distribution of salinity, temperature and dissolved oxygen

This Project was supported partially by the Ocean Frontiers Institute and a financial contribution from Fisheries and Oceans Canada / Ce Projet fut partiellement appuyé par une contribution financière de Pêches et Océans Canada.