2005 Strategic Environmental Assessment SEA6 Technical Report - Underwater Ambient Noise (Irish Sea)

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British Geological Survey (BGS)
Last updated:
15 March 2024
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Summary

This report is a contribution to the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA6) conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry (now Department of Energy and Climate Change). This report reviews the many different sources of underwater noise, both natural and anthropogenic, that combine to provide the background noise levels in which marine organisms need to survive throughout the SEA6 region. The sources of sound combine together in a complex manner resulting in significant spatial and temporal variations in the noise field. A map of the dominant noise sources in the Irish Sea is shown, indicating that man-made noise is the dominant source of noise over about 70% of the area. Shipping noise is likely to be dominant across large parts of the SEA6 area.

To fully characterise the ambient noise field in the SEA6 area would require multiple measurements at a large number of locations over a period of a year. However, a considerably lower cost approach would be to characterise each sound source and to use this with occurrence statistics for each source to model the ambient noise field across the region. The advantages and disadvantages of the acoustic modelling approach are discussed.

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Link to the data Format File added Data preview
Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) data portal HTML 15 March 2024 Not available

Additional information

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Added to data.gov.uk
2011-08-30
Access contraints
Not specified
Harvest GUID
aba64100-c152-4de3-e044-0003ba6f30bd
Extent
Latitude: 55.3° to 51.7°
Longitude: -6° to -4°
Spatial reference system
urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::4326
Dataset reference date
2005-01-01 (publication)
Frequency of update
notPlanned
Responsible party
British Geological Survey (BGS) (custodian); Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) (originator)
ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng
Source Metadata
XML
HTML

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Licence information

The SEAs data were produced as part of the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change's Offshore Energy Strategic Environmental Assessment programme; Crown Copyright, all rights reserved. The DECC SEA must be acknowledged in any maps or publications that make use of the data. All the data files are freely available to the public. The Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) data portal provides free access to available data and reports which have been produced through the SEA process. The site is run and managed by BGS on behalf of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Many files can be downloaded directly from this website. Those that are too large to download can be ordered via the website for postal delivery from BGS. BGS (NERC) has been contracted by DECC to publish SEA datasets on its behalf. All intellectual property rights (including , without limitation, copyrights, database rights and all other rights which subsist or may at any time in the future subsist in the Dataset(s)) in the Dataset(s) ('Intellectual Property Rights') are owned by DECC (formerly the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform). BGS has been authorised by DECC to use SEA datasets for all purposes but on a 'not-for-profit basis'. BGS has been authorised by DECC to pass on SEA datasets to third parties so that they can use them for all purposes but on a 'not-for-profit' basis.