Ocean Panels
The OCEAN group is the environmental read-out side of the Acoustics page: six stacked panels that answer “what is the sea doing right here?” — seabed, currents, water column, wind, surface weather and sea ice. They read the environment; they don’t set up the prediction. This page lists every control and every number, panel by panel.
How the OCEAN panels behave
Two rules run across the whole group, so once you know them each panel reads the same way.
Seafloor
Sediment class, grain size and bottom loss under the probe. Offline.
Currents LIVE
Set & drift at a chosen depth. HYCOM.
Water Column LIVE
Temperature / salinity / sound-speed profile + map wash.
Wind & Sea State LIVE
Wind, waves and swell, or a sea-state preset.
Surface Conditions LIVE
Duct tendency, visibility, pressure.
Sea Ice
Ice state, concentration and ice noise. Offline.
Seafloor
What the seabed under the probe is made of, and how much sound a bottom bounce costs. Works fully offline from the bundled sediment map; no upgrade needed.
| Row | What it shows |
|---|---|
| CLASS | The sediment type at the probe (e.g. deep-sea mud), with a colour swatch that matches the map’s substrate wash. The small caption credits the source — DUTKIEWICZ ’15 for the global baseline, or usSEABED / EMODnet where a finer regional pack answers. |
| MEAN GRAIN SIZE | The average grain size on the phi scale Φ — higher Φ means finer sediment. This single number is what drives the bottom-loss figure below. |
| BOTTOM LOSS | How much sound each bounce off the seabed loses, in dB. The caption reads @ 20° · 3.50 kHz: bottom loss depends on both angle and frequency, so it’s quoted at a representative 20° grazing angle and your current frequency. Move the frequency slider and this updates live. |
Currents LIVE · MuirWave Live
Ocean current at the probe, in the maritime set & drift convention, from live HYCOM data. This is operational awareness — currents don’t change sound speed, so this panel is entirely separate from the acoustics.
| Control / row | What it does |
|---|---|
| DEPTH slider | Choose the depth to read the current at — the currents data carries the full water column, so you can read drift at the surface or down at your mooring / vehicle depth. It snaps to the data’s native levels, is capped at the seabed under the probe, and is the same depth control shared with the Water Column panel and the map slice (see §05). |
| SET | The compass direction the current is flowing toward, in degrees true, three digits (e.g. 045°T). The caption FLOWS TOWARD spells out the convention so it can’t be misread as “coming from”. |
| DRIFT | The current speed in knots (kn). The caption marks the depth you’re sampling (SURFACE, or the depth in your chosen unit). |
| Status footer | Tells you what the panel is doing: LOADING DRIFT… while data downloads, DRIFT DATA UNAVAILABLE — MOVE THE MAP TO RETRY on failure, ENABLE OCEAN CURRENTS LAYER TO LOAD DRIFT when no reading is loaded, or the source credit HYCOM ESPC-D-V02 when a reading is live. |
Water Column LIVE
The vertical structure of the sea at the probe: temperature, salinity and the sound speed they produce, drawn as one twin profile and coupled to a depth-slice wash on the map. This is the authoritative home of your sound-speed profile.
| Control / element | What it does |
|---|---|
| LIVE / DB pill | The source switch for live sound speed. LIVE (brass) pulls real-time HYCOM temperature & salinity; DB (grey) uses the built-in WOA23 climatology. Sits above everything else so it’s always reachable — even before a regional pack is installed. Turning it on needs MuirWave Live. |
| Sound-speed unit chip | Tap to flip the sound-speed readouts between m/s and ft/s. |
| MAP WASH SHOWS | A three-way picker — Temp / Salinity / Sound spd — choosing which quantity the map’s depth-slice wash paints. The profile chart always shows all three regardless; this only drives the map colour. |
| Profile chart | Three curves down a shared depth axis: T temperature, S salinity, and the faint dashed c sound speed derived from them. A shaded band marks the mixed layer. Drag anywhere on the plot to place a cursor at that depth; lift to release. |
| Callouts | Four key numbers under the chart: SST sea-surface temperature, MIXED LAYER depth, SURF SALINITY, and CURSOR · T·S·c — the temperature, salinity and sound speed at whatever depth the cursor / scrubber is resting on. |
| DEPTH SCRUBBER | The signature control: a horizontal depth slider that snaps to the data’s native levels and is capped at the seabed under the probe. It moves the profile cursor and the map slice together (see §05). |
One depth, everywhere
There is a single depth setting shared across the ocean panels. Move the Water Column depth scrubber (or the Currents depth slider) and three things update in lock-step: the profile cursor, the currents read-out, and the map’s depth-slice wash. You never set the depth in three places.
Wind & Sea State LIVE
The surface weather driving the sea: live wind, waves and swell, or a hand-set sea-state preset when live data isn’t feeding. This is what roughens the sea surface and lifts the background noise.
| Control / row | What it does |
|---|---|
| LIVE / DB pill | Source switch, same as Water Column’s. LIVE pulls live wind & wave data; DB falls back to the sea-state preset. Turning it on needs MuirWave Live. When live is feeding, the readouts distinguish a live forecast from an archive (past-date) source — the archive tier carries wind only, so no wave, swell or compass appears. |
| Sea-state preset chip | Tap to cycle the manual sea state — CALM → LIGHT → MOD → FRESH → STRONG → GALE. This is the fallback that feeds the physics when live wind isn’t authoritative. The chip dims while live data is driving, to signal it isn’t what’s currently in charge. |
| Wind compass | In live-forecast mode, colour-matched arrows show the directions the wind (cyan), waves (brass) and swell (mint) are coming from — flying the way the energy is going, the way marine charts draw flow. Each arrow appears only when its direction is present. |
| Readout lines | Under the label: Wind (direction, knots, gust, sea state), Waves (direction, height, period), Swell (direction, height), Surface σ the sea-surface roughness the model uses, Surface loss per bounce at your frequency, and a Sea tag calling the sea wind-sea or swell-dominated. Lines that have no data simply don’t appear. |
Surface Conditions LIVE
The air–sea boundary — how today’s weather is shaping the near-surface sound channel, plus two plain go/no-go readings. It deliberately does not repeat wind and wave height; Wind & Sea State owns those.
| Row | What it shows |
|---|---|
| DUCT TENDENCY | The hero: a plain-language verdict on the surface duct — whether it’s holding, weakening under daytime heating, or absent — colour-banded by how favourable it is. Built from the air–sea temperature contrast and the sunshine reaching the sea (the classic “afternoon effect”). It’s a first-order estimate, read as guidance. Shows — when no live data feeds it. Related but distinct: the DUCT CUTOFF readout in Propagation → Output — that one is a frequency number (is your frequency trapped in the duct?), while this is a qualitative verdict on the duct itself. |
| VISIBILITY | Horizontal visibility at the surface, colour-banded as an observation go/no-go for visual marine-mammal watch: good (≥ 4 km), marginal (1–4 km), poor (< 1 km). |
| PRESSURE | Mean-sea-level pressure in hPa, as a weather-trend signal only. It is not an input to the acoustics — atmospheric pressure doesn’t meaningfully change underwater sound speed. |
| Context line | Tertiary context: air temperature, sea-surface temperature, cloud cover and sunshine. Hidden entirely when no live air temperature is available. |
Sea Ice
For polar work: the ice regime under the probe and the noise it makes. This runs from bundled monthly climatology — fully offline, no upgrade required — so it carries a source footer instead of a live/DB switch.
| Row | What it shows |
|---|---|
| ICE STATE | The hero verdict, banded on concentration: ice free (< 15 %), marginal ice zone (15–85 %, the loudest cryogenic regime), or solid pack (> 85 %, far quieter but never silent). The regime, not the raw percentage, is what sets the soundscape. |
| CONCENTRATION | The fraction of sea surface covered by ice, as a percentage. — means land or unsampled; 0 % is a real answer (open water). |
| ACTIVITY | An index (0–1) of how energetically the ice is making noise — it peaks in the middle of the marginal ice zone and rises with wind, marked wind-driven. |
| ICE NOISE | The ice contribution to the background-noise floor, as a spectral level in dB re 1 µPa²/Hz at its peak band. Reads excluded if you’ve switched the ice-noise source off in Ambient Noise, and — when there’s no ice. |
| Source footer | Names the provenance — the satellite climatology, its baseline period, and the month sampled — because this is typical conditions for the month, not a live ice chart. |