Does sonar pick up all of the noises in its search area and if so, how is it determined which noises they are interested in and which they aren’t?

Question

I’m reading about these people lost in the submersible and how they are using sonar to search for noises. Would the sonar not be flooded with a bunch of other noises that are natural to the ocean, making it hard to decipher which noises could be coming from the missing submersible?

In: 1

Answer 1

The short answer is computers. They know how the things they don’t look for sounds. Those sounds are filtered out automagically. There will of course still be false positives, but the human operator can look at the results and go “Yeah, that don’t make any sense. Let’s ignore that.”