Acoustical Oceanography Annual Reports

Spring 2005 Meeting — Vancouver, BC
Annual Report: Fall 2004, Spring 2005

The 2005 Medwin Prize in Acoustical Oceanography was awarded to Svein Vagle of the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, BC, “for development of acoustical techniques for probing the upper ocean boundary layer.” He presented the Medwin Prize Lecture entitled “Acoustic explorations of the upper ocean boundary layer.”

AO sponsored two special sessions. Bruce Howe (Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington) organized a session jointly with UW and AB entitled “Acoustics and Ocean Observatories.” Kenneth Foote (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) organized a session jointly with UW entitled “Riverine Acoustics.”

Srinivasan Jagannathan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) won first place in the competition for the Best Student Paper Award in Acoustical Oceanography for his paper entitled “Could animals detect the approaching tsunami?” Ben Biffard  (University of Victoria) was awarded second place for his paper entitled “Single beam echo sounding: considerations of depth and sea bed slope.”

Mike Wolfson (Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington) represented AO at the Technical Program Organizing Meeting.

Further details on recent student awards, and information on the the application procedure is available here.

Additional information on recent and upcoming Acoustical Oceanography Technical Committee Special Sessions is available here.

This report is my first as Chair of the AO Technical Committee.  I want to close by thanking all of the volunteers who have made the activities of the AO Technical Committee possible during this past year.

Fall 2004 Meeting — San Diego, CA

AO sponsored a special session entitled “Acoustic characterization of the benthic habitat,” which was organized by Kenneth Foote (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).

In addition AO co-sponsored a session with UW entitled “Acoustic sensing of internal waves,” which was organized by Jim Lynch (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) and featured a special lecture by Boris Katsnelson (Voronezh University, Russia). 

The Best Student Paper Awards in Acoustical Oceanography went to Eric Giddens (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), who won first place for his paper “Geoacoustic inversions in shallow water using Doppler shifted modes from a moving source” and Erica Summers-Morris (CSU Monterey Bay), who won second place for her paper “Geographical information systems (GIS) analysis of high-resolution multibeam bathymetry and remotely operated vehicle data to model rockfish habitat preference.”

Peter Worcester (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and Peter Gerstoft (Marine Physical Laboratory) represented AO at the Technical Program Organizing Meeting.

N. ROSS CHAPMAN, Acoustical Oceanography Chair, 2004–2007

 Previous Acoustical Oceanography Annual Reports: 

• Annual Report: Fall 2003, Spring 2004

• Annual Report: Fall 2002, Spring 2003

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