Infrasound as a cue for seabird navigation

Seabirds are amongst the most mobile of all animal species and spend large amounts of their lives at sea. They cross vast areas of ocean that appear superficially featureless, and our understanding of the mechanisms that they use for navigation remains incomplete, especially in terms of available cues. In particular, several large-scale navigational tasks, such as homing across thousands of kilometers to breeding sites, are not fully explained by visual, olfactory or magnetic stimuli. Low-frequency inaudible sound, i.e., infrasound, is ubiquitous in the marine environment. The spatio-temporal consistency of some components of the infrasonic wavefield, and the sensitivity of certain bird species to infrasonic stimuli, suggests that infrasound may provide additional cues for seabirds to navigate, but this remains untested. Here, we propose a framework to explore the importance of infrasound for navigation. We present key concepts regarding the physics of infrasound and review the physiological mechanisms through which infrasound may be detected and used. Next, we propose three hypotheses detailing how seabirds could use information provided by different infrasound sources for navigation as an acoustic beacon, landmark, or gradient. Finally, we reflect on strengths and limitations of our proposed hypotheses, and discuss several directions for future work. In particular, we suggest that hypotheses may be best tested by combining conceptual models of navigation with empirical data on seabird movements and in-situ infrasound measurements

Global quieting of high-frequency seismic noise due to COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures

Human activity causes vibrations that propagate into the ground as high-frequency seismic waves. Measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread changes in human activity, leading to a months-long reduction in seismic noise of up to 50%. The 2020 seismic noise quiet period is the longest and most prominent global anthropogenic seismic noise reduction on record. While the reduction is strongest at surface seismometers in populated areas, this seismic quiescence extends for many kilometers radially and hundreds of meters in depth. This provides an opportunity to detect subtle signals from subsurface seismic sources that would have been concealed in noisier times and to benchmark sources of anthropogenic noise. A strong correlation between seismic noise and independent measurements of human mobility suggests that seismology provides an absolute, real-time estimate of population dynamics

Infrasonic interferometry applied to synthetic and measured data

The estimation of the traveltime of infrasound through the atmosphere is interesting for several applications. For example, it could be used to determine temperature and wind of the atmosphere, since the traveltime depends on these atmospheric conditions (Haney, 2009). In this work the traveltime is estimated with infrasonic interferometry. In other words, we calculate the crosscorrelations of data of spatially distributed receivers. With this method the traveltime between two receivers is determined without the need for ground truth events. In a first step, we crosscorrelate synthetic data, which are generated by a raytracing model. This model takes into account the traveltime along the rays, the attenuation of the different atmospheric layers, the spreading of the rays and the influence of caustics. In these numerical experiments we show that it is possible to determine the traveltime through infrasonic interferometry. We present the results of infrasonic interferometry applied to measured data. Microbaroms are used in the crosscorrelation approach. Microbaroms are caused by ocean waves and are measured by the 'Large Aperture Infrasound Array' (LAIA). LAIA is being installed by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in the framework of the radio-astronomical 'Low Frequency Array' (LOFAR) initiative. LAIA consists currently of around twenty receivers (microbarometers) with an aperture of around 100 km, allowing for several inter-station distances. Here, we show the results of crosscorrelations as a function of receivers distance, to assess the signal coherency. This research is made possible by the support of the 'Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research' (NWO). Haney, M., 2009. Infrasonic ambient noise interferometry from correlations of microbaroms, Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L1980

Estimating tropospheric and stratospheric winds using infrasound from explosions

The receiver-to-source backazimuth of atmospheric infrasound signals is biased when cross-winds are present along the propagation path. Infrasound from 598 surface explosions from over 30 years in northern Finland is measured with high spatial resolution on an array 178 km almost due North. The array is situated in the classical shadow-zone distance from the explosions. However, strong infrasound is almost always observed, which is most plausibly due to partial reflections from stratospheric altitudes. The most probable propagation paths are subject to both tropospheric and stratospheric cross-winds, and the wave-propagation modelling in this study yields good correspondence between the observed backazimuth deviation and cross-winds from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis (ERA)-Interim reanalysis product. This study demonstrates that atmospheric cross-winds can be estimated directly from infrasound data using propagation time and backazimuth deviation observations. This study finds these cross-wind estimates to be in good agreement with the ERA-Interim reanalysis