Instantaneous continental-shelf scale sensing of cod with Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS)

Reported declines in the population of Atlantic cod have a potential to affect long-term ecological balance and the sustainability of the cod fishery along the US northeast coast. These assessments have led to severe fishing cuts over the past few years, have consequently threatened the centuries-old Atlantic cod fishery along the New England coast and put the livelihood of thousands of fishermen at risk. Amidst this fisheries crisis, calls by elected officials, environmental groups and fishing consortiums were made for an Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS) survey of the Gulf of Maine cod stock. Typically, cod stock assessments incorporate data collected from conventional acoustic and trawl line transect surveys that highly undersample the marine environment in space and time and lead to ambiguities in population estimates. The combination of conventional methods and OAWRS techniques, however, has been demonstrated to provide rapid and accurate fish stock assessments over ecosystem-scale areas for other species. In this thesis, the feasibility of accurately surveying cod stocks with OAWRS is theoretically assessed. These theoretical predictions are then experimentally verified by successfully sensing cod with OAWRS over ecosystem scales in the Nordic Seas. Following direct requests by Massachusetts state officials to determine if OAWRS could be used to detect and survey the reported waning cod populations in coastal New England waters, we obtained measurements of typical aggregation densities and occupancy depths of spawning cod in Ipswich Bay from conventional echosounder surveys conducted in Spring 2011. Cod length distributions were also measured from which we estimated the swimbladder resonance frequencies of local cod via a harmonic oscillator model that includes the effects of damping, the cod's swim bladder air volume at a given neutral buoyancy depth as well as changes to this volume for deviations from neutral buoyancy depth. The optimal frequency for OAWRS detection typically corresponds to that where the resonance peak is found. We showed that our theoretical estimates of cod swimbladder resonance matched very well with independent measurements of caged cod resonance from decades old Norwegian data. Using parabolic equation modeling of ocean waveguide propagation, the scattered level of typical spawning cod aggregations was estimated and compared with that from seafloor scattering, which is a typical limiting factor in long range active sensing. Seafloor scattering was estimated via a Rayleigh-Born approach we developed, where the magnitude squared of seafloor scattering amplitude was empirically determined from thousands of measurements made during major OAWRS experiments along the US Northeast coast. It was found that near cod swimbladder resonance (roughly 150-600 Hz), determined from the New England length and depth distribution data, OAWRS was capable of robustly detecting spawning cod aggregations from many tens of kilometers in range with high signal-to- noise ratios (SNRs) greater than…