Bryde’s whale behavioral metrics in the Southern California Bight from acoustic array tracking

The Southern California Bight (SCB) is a highly productive ecosystem and thus, attracts a variety of cetaceans, including Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera edeni). It also has areas of high human activity where ocean noise includes by sound from commercial shipping as well as from sonar activity. Several encounters of Bryde’s whales were tracked in this area using a large-aperture seafloor array of five High-frequency Acoustic Recordings Packages (HARPs), deployed from December 2010 to February 2011. Bryde’s whale Be4 calls were manually detected. Time-difference-of-arrivals (TDOAs) of a call between each hydrophone pair were computed by cross-correlating time series waveforms. A 10 km × 10 km area with 25-m grid spacing and homogeneous sound speed was used to calculate sets of modeled TDOAs for each grid point. To localize each whale call, the grid point with the smallest total least-squares difference between the set of measured and modeled TDOAs was used. Successive locations provide tracks from which sound...