Impact Assessment Of Underwater Noise On Divers.

The diving for occupational and recreational purposes is on the rise and more and more people are entities are going underwater with or without gears. However, on the other side the underwater noise pollution is also on the rise with the increasing activities in the marine and freshwater systems. The lack of awareness about underwater noise and its impact on human hearing is a major cause of concern. The precise source-path-receiver assessment is the key to establishing the cause & impact relation. The Indo-Pacific region is now being seen as the most important strategic space and more and more global powers are maintaining their strategic presence in the region. This causes a twin counter intuitive dilemma, on one hand we need to deploy more and more divers to manage the increasing activities in the underwater domain, however the increasing activities is causing serious acoustic degradation for these divers, often leading to serious damage to their hearing mechanism and reduced efficiency in their diving efforts.

The precise source-path-receiver assessment will mean identification of the source of noise than can impact human hearing. Prediction of the trends of noise is critical for effective management. The path is the most critical component in the tropical waters, as the source signal gets severely modified. The effective modelling of the underwater channel under the varying conditions is the most important effort. The receiver (human hearing) characteristics is the start of this assessment, as matching the intensity of the source signal post modification during the acoustic propagation through the tropical channel will determine the severity of the impact. Digital tools have a major contribution to this source-path-receiver assessment. The Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) or the spatio-temporal mapping will be the critical start of such studies to obtain a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the cause & impact.

The multi-disciplinary study is extremely important to make sure a comprehensive assessment is initiated, before any intervention is arrived at. The technology aspect of developing the source-path-receiver assessment, then a detailed medical and psycho-acoustic analysis to establish the accurate impact on the human diver. The perceptual and professional inputs from the divers will be another dimension of the study. Putting all of these together and then formalizing the policy & technology intervention to ensure a better environment for diving. The interventions have to address aspects of source and how to minimize the noise at source. The path can also be used to optimize the deployments and then the interventions at the receiver to minimize the impact on the divers and enhance their deployment on site.

The digital transformation will be the key to generating the tools for prediction of the acoustic degradation in the future. This will allow effective governance mechanism to holistically manage this issue of underwater noise and impact on the human diver. This project addresses the multiple aspects of the source-path-receiver model and also the varied multi-disciplinary study components. The interventions formalized post the study and assessment in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) to start with, will allow nuanced governance mechanisms to be put in place.