Development of a New Empirical Model for Predicting Underwater Noise due to Pile Driving

There has been a growing concern in recent years about the effects of anthropogenic noise due to pile driving on underwater wildlife. Over the past three years, investigators have collected several datasets of noise-levels during pile driving from sites throughout the state of Florida using a unique buoy-mounted instrumentation system first presented at Geo-Congress 2020. In this paper, a new empirical sound attenuation model is presented using these data. Included in this model are unique design parameters for driven concrete piles, driven steel piles, and vibrated steel piles. Interestingly, this new model appears to show some dependency between sound amplitude and attenuation efficiency regardless of drive-type, although the reasons for this dependency remain unclear.