Guest Editorial: The International Airgun Modeling Workshop

The papers in this special issue had its origins in the International Airgun Modeling Workshop (the Workshop), which took place in Dublin, Ireland, on July 16, 2016. The purpose of the Workshop was to address the demand for increasingly precise assessment of the environmental impacts of seismic surveys. However, an increase in precision requires accurate characterization of the sound field radiated by an airgun array, including the interface between source signature models and sound propagation models. The impacts of airgun sounds on marine life are predicted by first deriving the sound field through a combination of source signature models with sound propagation models. Impact ranges are then estimated according to acoustic criteria, and that information can be further analyzed by assessing risks to local densities and populations. The Workshop scope included modeling of the airguns’ signatures and of the sound field at distances from a few meters to a few tens of kilometers from each source, including the near field of a realistic airgun array. In addition to sound pressure, participants were requested to calculate sound particle acceleration because of its importance to fishes and invertebrates.