The Sound Risk Indicator Tool addresses the need for rapid assessment of design changes to noisy activities. It accounts for most marine fauna and presents the result as a single number, facilitating easy comparisons.

Development Partnership

Equinor and Irwin Carr collaborated to create the SRI tool. Given that acoustic propagation modeling in marine environments is inherently complex and computationally intensive—often requiring processing times spanning several hours to days—this tool was developed to expedite the evaluation process.

Methodology and Capabilities

The SRI tool employs conservative modeling methods for sound propagation, delivering results in seconds to minutes rather than extended processing periods. It analyzes information about noise-generating activities to forecast whether design modifications will increase or decrease environmental impacts on marine fauna.

The tool evaluates frequency-dependent sensitivities across eleven animal groups, encompassing all marine mammals, most fish species, and turtles. This comprehensive approach covers 33 threshold values for both impulsive noise (peak level and sound exposure level) and continuous noise (sound exposure level).

The system accepts activity data as band levels or time-series formats—commonly available from commercial seismic array models—plus source movement information. When source data is unavailable, built-in models generate source levels for large vessels and seismic arrays.

Reliability Assessment

The simple propagation methodology provides “a good estimate of the highest possible impact.” This means conservative predictions of minimal impact reasonably indicate that advanced modeling will similarly demonstrate little environmental effect, offering confidence in preliminary assessments.

The SRI tool is available as part of dBSea. Contact your local distributor for more information.