Aircraft Noise and Climate Effects wins state-of-the-art multibeam echo sounder

The Aircraft Noise and Climate Effects group is the winner of the R2Sonic Multispectral Challenge. The prize is a R2Sonic 2026 multispectral multibeam echo sounder.

PhD researcher Timo C. Gaida accepted the award on behalf of the group at the GeoHab2018 conference in Santa Barbara, California, USA in May 2018. The paper was co-authored by Afrizal Tengku Ali, Mirjam Snellen and Dick Simons and is a result of extensive research by the group.

The challenge aims to “validate the hypotheses that the different acoustics of multi-frequency backscatter data may significantly improve the seabed characterisation and to develop an algorithm that robustly and repeatedly may determine bottom type based on multispectral data.” The paper, titled “A multispectral Bayesian method for improved discrimination performance of seabed sediment classification using multi-frequency multibeam backscatter data” was selected to be the best out of a pool of six papers by a jury.

The echo sounder was delivered to the Faculty last week (valued at 270,000 USD), but will eventually be placed on a boat to allow researchers to further map sediment and provide information for environmental impact studies, dredging and pipe laying.