WhaleSonic: Recordings of cetacean vocal behaviour with hydrophone arrays in Northern Norway

WhaleSonic delivers 78 hours of calibrated, UTC-synchronized hydrophone-array recordings of four cetacean species in Northern Norway’s fjord system, plus 52 days of continuous bottom data.

• Why it matters: Co-occurring killer whales, humpback whales, fin whales, and sperm whales in confined winter waters create a rare setting to capture multi-species acoustic behavior amid vessel noise.
• What they did: Two synchronized array systems were used: four drifting buoys with tetrahedral arrays and seven bottom-mounted hydrophones, with in-situ transmission and sound-velocity measurements for ground truth.
• The result: The dataset is provided in physical units with a unified coordinate system and open-source tools, enabling multichannel methods for source separation, localization, sound-field analysis, and group communication.

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