Remote sensing of Pacific hurricane and radiometric measurements from foam and slicks

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

How Can Dolphins Recognize Fish According to Their Echoes? A Statistical Analysis of Fish Echoes

Echo-based object classification is a fundamental task of animals that use a biosonar system. Dolphins and porpoises should be able to rely on echoes to discriminate a predator from a prey or to select a desired prey from an undesired object. Many studies have shown that dolphins and porpoises can discriminate between objects according to their echoes. All of these studies however, used unnatural objects that can be easily characterized in human terminologies (e.g., metallic spheres, disks, cylinders). In this work, we collected real fish echoes from many angles of acquisition using a sonar system that mimics the emission properties of dolphins and porpoises. We then tested two alternative statistical approaches in classifying these echoes. Our results suggest that fish species can be classified according to echoes returning from porpoise- and dolphin-like signals. These results suggest how dolphins and porpoises can classify fish based on their echoes and provide some insight as to which features might enable the classification

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Short-Term Ambient Ozone Exposure and COPD Hospitalizations

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the third leading cause of death globally and ozone exposure is

Electrodynamics of Media

Contains reports on two research projects.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 28-043-AMC-02536(E)U.S. Air Force (ESD) Contract F19628-70-C-006

Common humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) sound types for passive acoustic monitoring

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2011. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 129 (2011): 476-482, doi:10.1121/1.3504708.Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are one of several baleen whale species in the Northwest Atlantic that coexist with vessel traffic and anthropogenic noise. Passive acoustic monitoring strategies can be used in conservation management, but the first step toward understanding the acoustic behavior of a species is a good description of its acoustic repertoire. Digital acoustic tags (DTAGs) were placed on humpback whales in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary to record and describe the non-song sounds being produced in conjunction with foraging activities. Peak frequencies of sounds were generally less than 1 kHz, but ranged as high as 6 kHz, and sounds were generally less than 1 s in duration. Cluster analysis distilled the dataset into eight groups of sounds with similar acoustic properties. The two most stereotyped and distinctive types (“wops” and “grunts”) were also identified aurally as candidates for use in passive acoustic monitoring. This identification of two of the most common sound types will be useful for moving forward conservation efforts on this Northwest Atlantic feeding ground.This paper was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Marine Sanctuaries Program. It was also sponsored in part by the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, under Institutional Grant No. NA05OAR4171048 from the NOAA Office of Sea Grant, Department of Commerce

Logarithmic perturbation theory for quasinormal modes

Logarithmic perturbation theory (LPT) is developed and applied to quasinormal modes (QNMs) in open systems. QNMs often do not form a complete set, so LPT is especially convenient because summation over a complete set of unperturbed states is not required. Attention is paid to potentials with exponential tails, and the example of a Poschl-Teller potential is briefly discussed. A numerical method is developed that handles the exponentially large wavefunctions which appear in dealing with QNMs.Comment: 24 pages, 4 Postscript figures, uses ioplppt.sty and epsfig.st

The acoustic field on the forehead of echolocating Atlantic bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128 (2010): 1426-1434, doi:10.1121/1.3372643.Arrays of up to six broadband suction cup hydrophones were placed on the forehead of two bottlenose dolphins to determine the location where the beam axis emerges and to examine how signals in the acoustic near-field relate to signals in the far-field. Four different array geometries were used; a linear one with hydrophones arranged along the midline of the forehead, and two around the front of the melon at 1.4 and 4.2 cm above the rostrum insertion, and one across the melon in certain locations not measured by other configurations. The beam axis was found to be close to the midline of the melon, approximately 5.4 cm above the rostrum insert for both animals. The signal path coincided with the low-density, low-velocity core of the melon; however, the data suggest that the signals are focused mainly by the air sacs. Slight asymmetry in the signals were found with higher amplitudes on the right side of the forehead. Although the signal waveform measured on the melon appeared distorted, when they are mathematically summed in the far-field, taking into account the relative time of arrival of the signals, the resultant waveform matched that measured by the hydrophone located at 1 m.This work was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research

Electrodynamics of Media

Contains research objectives, summary of research and reports on one research project.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DAAB07-71-C-0300U.S. Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories Contract F19628-70-C-0064M.I.T. Sloan Fund for Basic Research(Grant 616)M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory Purchase Order A-627