Central North Sea mooring
Early in the project, TNO identified a large “quiet” region in the central North Sea, with very little shipping activity. It was suggested that some sound recordings from this location would be useful to give confidence in the models, even if data were not available for the whole of 2019.
After many months of trying, an opportunity arose to deploy a mooring within the Scottish sector of this region, in late October 2019. A survey on Marine Scotland’s research vessel Scotia was undertaking sediment sampling around the Scottish North Sea, and would be visiting this quiet area. At short notice, some equipment was arranged, tested and set up for deployment, and on 29 October a Wildlife Acoustics SM3M was deployed at the site illustrated below. We hope that this mooring will be recovered during a groundfish survey in late Jan/mid Feb 2020. The data logger will be downloaded in Aberdeen by the end of February.
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Deployment date |
29 October 2019 |
16:41 UTC |
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Depth |
81 metres |
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Method of deployment |
Single-point mooring using Edgetech PORT acoustic release; Wildlife Acoustics SM3M, sampling at 96 kHz, recording a 10min on/20min off duty cycle; Chelonia C-POD |
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Reason location was chosen |
Very little mobile fishing gear activity (from VMS); low levels of shipping; should be easy to recover opportunistically; within Scottish sector of UK EEZ |
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Planned recovery date |
late February 2020 |
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