Welcome to BOAT fundamentals!

Welcome to BOAT fundamentals!#

Ever wondered how whales chat across vast ocean basins? Or how we can “see” underwater without light to track fish or map the seafloor?

In this executable Jupyter Book, you will find tutorials that introduce fundamental ocean acoustics concepts via plain languages and interactive “widgets” that you can play with to develop physical intuition and think about ocean acoustic problems in a holistic manner.

Ocean acoustics technology powers a wide range of real-world applications. We hope these tutorials will offer an entry point for anyone interested to dive deeper into the fascinating world of underwater sound.

What is BOAT#

Bridge to Ocean Acoustic and Technology (BOAT) is an open education program for ocean acoustics via executable tutorials. Our goal is to broaden access to ocean acoustics by empowering learners to explore and advance the field through collaboration and shared knowledge. Learn more about our philosophy here.

Development roadmap#

With the open-source developer spirit, we view the BOAT tutorials as living documents that:

  • learners can interact with dynamically through cloud-hosted platforms

  • will continue to grow through efforts of tutorial contributors and maintainers

To jump start the BOAT program, we are actively building the fundamentals tutorials and will engage participants in two in-person workshops in spring 2025 to test and evaluate the materials and the approach.

Beyond the fundamentals, we plan to develop additional tutorials focused on:

  • building in-depth understanding of the physics and mathematics in ocean acoustics

  • developing aptitude to leverage modern high-performance computing technologies in ocean acoustics research

Interested in taking part or have questions? Feel free to reach out to boat.ocean.acoustics@gmail.com!

Acknowledgement#

We are grateful for the financial support of the US Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the inspiration from many wonderful open education programs, in particular the Software Carpantry, OceanHackWeek, and Project Pythia.

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