Speaker
Description
The deep-sea cabled infrastructure operated by INFN-LNS provides a platform for continuous acoustic monitoring in the Ionian Sea, southeast of Sicily, Italy. In recent years, it has expanded significantly, integrating different observatories and sensing technologies for long-term monitoring of the underwater acoustic environment. The system includes the Test Site offshore Catania and the deep-sea observatory at Capo Passero, where the KM3NeT/ARCA telescope is located. These sites are connected to shore laboratories through electro-optical cables for power supply and real-time data transmission, with termination frames (junction boxes) that allow the connection of different sensors. A central element of this system is the ITINERIS long-baseline hydrophone array deployed at the Capo Passero site. The array is composed of three synchronized broadband receivers spaced by approximately 300 m and operating continuously. The hydrophones are calibrated over a frequency range from a few Hz up to about 80 kHz. This provides the opportunity to analyze temporal variability and spatial coherence of ambient noise, as well as to identify and localize acoustic sources. The system is expected to be further expanded with the deployment of additional hydrophones. In this work, an overview of the infrastructure and preliminary results from the hydrophone data analysis are presented, along with the approach adopted for long-term data processing and archiving.