This document provides requirements and recommendations for measuring and reporting ambient sound in water, as characterized by sound pressure and selected quantities that can be derived from sound pressure. “Ambient sound” implies sound from any source except sources of self-noise.

The scope includes equipment performance, calibration and deployment, digital data acquisition and data processing. Data processing is the process of converting raw data into a form and context necessary to be interpreted by people and computers. The scope includes data analysis and reporting of recordings of duration one day or longer.

Five data processing stages are considered: raw digital acquisition data³⁾, sound pressure time series, sound pressure level time series, sound pressure spectra and their statistics.

The scope excludes measurement of particle motion.