Overview of ocean ambient noise and application prospects

Ocean ambient noise is usually considered as an interfering background factor.In traditional underwater acoustics, research has mainly focused on the reduction and restriction of ambient noise interference in underwater devices in order to enhance device performance and detection range. For this purpose, many countries have invested a lot of manpower and material resources to collect and analyze data and propose models of the ambient noise field. On the other hand, this noise is ever present in the ocean, and includes a great deal of environmental information concerning the hydrology, sea surface and seabed. Consequently, ocean ambient noise may be used to study the physical characteristics of the ocean, as well as to obtain a high yield of useful ocean acoustical information at low cost. By exploiting the wide frequency band and perpetual ambient noise, we may extract many ocean environment parameters.