University Events

Description: Topic: Listening to the Ocean: Sound of Rain and Wind

Speaker: Dr. Shima Abadi, Assistant Professor, Engineering & Mathematics, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Washington.

Zoom Teleconference: https://umassd.zoom.us/j/94420212334

Abstract:
Any sound produced in the ocean is confined between the ocean surface and the ocean floor and travels a great distance. The relationship between the underwater ecosystem and the composition of its sounds is called "ocean ambient noise" or "ocean soundscape" which reveals important information about the ocean environment, such as marine life, geological activities, natural phenomena, and the human footprint in the ocean. The complexity of the ocean environment makes it difficult to mathematically model ocean sound levels. Only accumulative data covering a long time period is useful in conducting a comprehensive ocean noise analysis. Most of the ocean noise datasets are scarce and limited to specific time periods and locations. However, today's technologies allow us to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics of the ocean over a long period of time using a wide range of sensors. The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is a large-scale project that provides a unique observation of the ocean using more than 800 instruments including hydrophones which are recording ocean noise since 2015 in near real-time. In this talk, we use this unique and rich dataset to evaluate the contribution of rain and surface wind to the ocean noise. We use 3.5 years of acoustical and meteorological data recorded at the northeast Pacific Ocean to characterize and model the rain and wind noise received at both shallow and deep water.

Biography:
Shima Abadi received her B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran in 2008, her M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2010, and her M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and her Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2013. She was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at the Columbia University and a Visiting Scientist at the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington from 2013 to 2015. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Engineering & Mathematics and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research primarily focuses on acoustical signal processing in ocean sciences. She worked on a broad range of topics such as blind deconvolution, sound source localization, direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, acoustical imaging, and animal bioacoustics. Dr. Abadi has received two best paper awards from the Acoustical Society of America in 2009 and 2013. She is currently working on mitigating seismic airgun noise, analyzing ocean ambient noise, and developing graph signal processing algorithms for analyzing data collected by large, dynamic, and irregular underwater network.

The Seminars is open to the public free of charge.

*For further information, please contact Dr. John Buck via email at jbuck@umassd.edu.