Acoustic Spreading…what's that?
Well the Beam Reach students are about to figure that out. It’s amazing to me how quickly students learn in this hands on program. The instructors provide them with an introduction, show them how things work and why, and then help the students in the field. Some of the students know almost nothing about acoustics when they arrive and leave knowing how to gather acoustical data, interpret it, and use it to draw conclusions.
I’ve been a part of Beam Reach for a little over two years now (I’m in the office) and, while some of this rings familiar, it is still so complicated to me because I’m not a scientist and I haven’t gotten to do the program. (I’m finding it more and more difficult to get away for a week, much less ten of them!)
So it is with true joy and amazement that I watch our students absorb this information and become confident in their abilities. Here’s a sample from a beginning exercise they do. To some of you out there this will make sense, to the rest of us, well we can only be grateful that somebody understands it.
Dear students, Congratulations on making it through the calibration and spreading sessions on the dock this morning, as well as the very brief Matlab tutorial. For your exercise that you should hand in before 5:30 this afternoon (via email) you should include the following information: The metadata for the two experiments. The calibration factor for each of the 4 hydrophones and an explanation of how you calculated it. The received level (in dB re 1 microPascal) of each hydrophone for the spreading experiment. A plot of those received levels vs the log of the distance from the source. A regression line through those data points with the slope, R-squared value and the source level (in dB re 1 microPascal @ 1 m). Just in case your confused; the following channels correspond to the following wav files: Calibration ex: A01_1.wav Ch 1 A01_2.wav Ch 2 C01_1.wav Ch3 C01_2.wav Ch4 Spreading ex: A03_1.wav Ch1 (the farthest hydrophone from the speaker) A03_2.wav Ch2 C03_1.wav Ch3 C03_2.wav Ch4 (the closest hydrophone from the speaker) Also as a reminder, the energy exercise is Due at 8:30 on the 16th. Because we will be off island this weekend and again on Tues to pick up food for our adventures at sea, you should plan on collecting the data that is needed for the energy exercise today or on Monday (look back at the excel sheet that Val gave you for a reminder). I'll post next week's syllabus in S1 so you have an idea of what will be happening. Good luck Jason Jason Wood, PhD, Instructor Beam Reach, http://beamreach.org Marine Science and Sustainability School jason@beamreach.org
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook