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IMOS - National Mooring Network - Passive Acoustic Observatory at Tuncurry, NSW (PATUN)

Created 23/06/2025

Updated 23/06/2025

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The Tuncurry Passive Acoustic Observatory (near Tuncurry/Forster, NSW) consists of two to four moorings fitted with /hydrophones set on the seabed at 130-190 m depth that record noise in the ocean. This system can be used to monitor whale and fish migrations, seismic activity and other natural and man-made noise sources. If four moorings are set they are configured with a mooring at each apex of an approximate equilateral triangle of 5 km side with the fourth mooring in the triangle centre. Temperature loggers are set on each mooring at the seabed. Each logger records at a sampling rate of 6 kHz for between 3-8 min of every 15 min. If four loggers are set a 22 kHz recording is also made once a day to allow accurate synchronisation of the instrument clocks. This is required for locating the source of a sound based on its time of arrival at each hydrophone in the array. A 7 kHz pinger set on the central mooring pings for 35 minutes at a 20 s interval once per day to overlap the 22 kHz sample. Raw data from each logger is in the form of mixed binary/text files comprised of: 1) text header and footer containing recording start and end date/time, quality control and sampling configuration; and 2) sea noise data of 16 bit unsigned integer, binary values (IEEE, little endian). Instruments are calibrated for system gain with white noise of known level input with the hydrophone in series, before and after deployments. System calibrations are made over 2 Hz to the Nyquist frequency. The instrument clock drift is checked against GPS transmitted UTC time before and after deployment. The raw data can be obtained on portable disk from the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN). The Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST) at Curtin University has developed Matlab software to process and analyse these data. This observatory was decommissioned in early 2018.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title IMOS - National Mooring Network - Passive Acoustic Observatory at Tuncurry, NSW (PATUN)
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/en/dataset/5c053890-5f63-4e9d-94f2-67acc68797f1
Contact Point
Australian Ocean Data Network
info@aodn.org.au
Reference Period 09/02/2010 - 08/02/2017
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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      ],
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      ],
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  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Australian Oceans Data Network

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Australian Oceans Data Network "IMOS - National Mooring Network - Passive Acoustic Observatory at Tuncurry, NSW (PATUN)". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://catalogue.aodn.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/imos-national-mooring-network-passive-acoustic-observatory-at-tuncurry-nsw-patun