Underwater radiated noise from commercial ships in the Yellow Sea of China

Abstract

During the past decades, ship-building and engine-manufacturing have developed very quickly. The source levels of modern ships may have changed. The underwater radiated noise from many commercial ships of opportunity was measured by bottom-mounted self-contained hydrophone near the shipping lanes in the yellow sea of China one day in each month from June. 2014 to Mar. 2016. Twenty seven ships among them are selected whose peak value of 20-1000Hz passing curve is 10dB higher than background noise level. A Gaussian source distribution in depth direction is supposed and source levels normalized at different ranges are averaged in source levels acquisition to reduce the error of transmission loss calculation. A key result was the estimated results of RANDI-3 are much greater than measured results universally for ships whose length are larger than 200 meters, however, the two are close for ships whose length are less than 150 meters. Furthermore, the samples were divided into two categories to analyze. The broad-band source levels of modern commercial ships are not highly correlated to ship length but closely related to ship speed. The decay slope is less than RANDI-3.