Moment analysis of ambient noise dominated by local shipping

The stationarity and local Gaussianity of ambient shipping noise recorded during an experiment conducted in the San Diego port area is investigated. First through fourth order moments are used to identify time periods of nonstationarity in the noise. Comparison of the shipping data with colored Gaussian noise indicates that the third order moments deviate from Gaussianity more than the fourth order moments. The local Gaussianity is quantified using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. While the shipping noise at the deeper depth appears somewhat non-Gaussian during certain time periods, the shallower depth data appears Gaussian.