Whidbey Unit Is All Ears For The Sea -- System Can Sort Out Subs From Drift-Netters

WHIDBEY ISLAND NAVAL AIR STATION - The underwater sounds of fishing boats, whales, volcanoes and earthquakes used to be little more than nuisances to the people who toil in the super-secret NAVFAC building on this Navy air base.

This spring, however, tracking, recording and analyzing those sounds - particularly those from boats fishing illegally - could be part of their bread and butter.

The primary mission at NAVFAC, jargon for Navy facility, continues to be tracking silent-running foreign submarines. But a recent experiment by "acoustic artists" in NAVFAC's underground computer room proved there are more sounds to sort and analyze than just subs.

Last September, NAVFAC crews turned their skills to tracking fishing boats operating illegally in the North Pacific. Two weeks later, they had zeroed in on more than two dozen Chinese boats using drift nets, which are now banned worldwide by the United Nations.

Navy Cmdr. Mary Mosier and her team of 300 were at center stage in the experiment, working around the clock, seven days a week in the bunker-type building.

They operate what was once known as SOSUS, Sound Surveillance System, a network of hundreds of listening devices planted on the ocean floor in the past 40 years to detect and track Soviet submarines. SOSUS was highlighted in Tom Clancy's best-selling novel and subsequent movie, "The Hunt For Red October."

SOSUS has since been declassified and is now known as the

"Integrated Undersea Surveillance System," or IUSS.

The Navy is expected to decide by May 2 whether IUSS can be used regularly to track boats using drift nets or fishing in closed waters.

"Everything I hear is 98 percent positive," Mosier said during a recent tour of NAVFAC.

For security reasons, Mosier made it clear the Navy's welcome did not extend to the windowless lower level of the building.

"The primary task here is ASW (anti-submarine warfare). The Cold War is over but there are still countries that have submarines," she said.

From their demeanor, Mosier and Lt. Mary Beth Chipkevick, from IUSS headquarters in Washington, D.C., are eager to begin tracking drift-net fishing boats.

"In that experiment in September," Mosier said, "we detected what we believe were 30 drift-net fishing vessels. Several were fishing over the line in a prohibited area, and a P3 patrol plane flew out there and went right to them."

On a screen she displayed photos of the vessels taken by a P3 crew member. She would not say how the boats were located.

China did not sign treaties that closed parts of the North Pacific to all fishing when salmon and steelhead trout return to their Northwest and Siberian streams to spawn. Federal authorities last year warned that China was stepping up its drift-net fishing despite the pending U.N. ban.

Fishing boats aren't the only things the crews are tuning in to.

"We are now developing expertise in what whales sound like, surface ships and volcanic and seismic activity," said Chipkevick.

"In the past," added Mosier, "we thought these sounds were total nuisances, background noises we traditionally weeded out."

Chipkevick continued: "It's like sitting in a stadium full of yelling people and trying to pick out what the guy in the green hat is saying. There are that many ships and animals out there, all making noises."

On the East Coast, IUSS recording tapes of migrating whales have been turned over to marine mammal scientists under the title, "We hear the whales talking."

Chipkevick described the scientists as "overwhelmed with what we have given them, really overwhelmed. One scientist said he learned more in one day from our tapes than he had learned in his entire career."

Similarly, tapes of seismic sounds made by movement of tectonic plates of the Earth's crust are now made available to NOAA scientists because sound transmission is much more effective through water than through land.

"We became very good at submarines," Mosier said. "Now we are very excited about honing our skills on the other sounds we have always weeded out and putting them to use."

The NAVFAC building, built in 1987, holds $82 million worth of computers and other electronic gear.

Here's how the electronic listening system works:

Hundreds of devices called hydrophones ring the North Pacific and can detect virtually every sound in the ocean. Those sounds are turned into electronic signals and transmitted by cable to receiving stations such as those at Pacific Beach on the Washington coast and at Coos Head on the Oregon coast.

Those signals are relayed by satellite to Whidbey Island and fed into computers whose video monitors display them as vertical gray bands of varying widths, shades and densities.

The analysts are trained to identify the sounds by reading the video bands. These "acoustic artists" don't use earphones. Everything is displayed and worked on video monitors.

"The analyst can speed up or slow down what he is looking at and use what amounts to different filters to sort out the sounds," Chipkevick said. "This is all visual, like a photograph of sound."

When a sound is isolated and identified, its location is marked on another large screen showing a map of the ocean.

Chipkevick said the only additional expense for the additional tracking could be $1 million to "tweak our software" to sharpen the computers.

The acoustic analysts attend a nine-week school to learn their way in the system, but it takes 10 years to reach the top levels of this work, Chipkevick says. Many analysts score highly in physics and math. A third of the 300 in Mosier's command are analysts.

"People come into this and love it because it's exciting and they are professionals with computer expertise," Mosier said. "We have no trouble recruiting."

Mosier wants to keep the analysts challenged and working hard: "Anything they do to improve their skills can only make them function more efficiently in the primary task and that is still ASW."