Whale calls (sonobuoy)
CalCOFI Sonobuoy Baleen Whale Call Detections
sio_cetacean-sonobuoySIOlicence pendingv2026.10.05validated
- years
- 2004–2012
- observations
- 9,270
- sampling events
- 958
- stations
- 92
- species
- 3
Overview
Hourly presence of blue, fin and humpback whale calls in sonobuoy recordings from CalCOFI cruises, 2004-2012. Each record is one hour of a DIFAR or omnidirectional sonobuoy deployment near a CalCOFI station, scanned by an analyst as 60-second spectrogram windows, with the call types heard. Curated by the Scripps Whale Acoustics Lab (Baumann-Pickering) and staged from the CalCOFI marine mammal Shiny app repository (CalCOFI/marmam-app). The hydrophone depth is not recorded (the DIFAR or omnidirectional setting is not given), so sample and observation depths are empty, not 0 m. Hours scanned only for a few calls (“adhoc only”) are kept as samples with no presence value.
Open with the provider
- Q01 license — open
- Q02 citation_main — open
- Q03 pi_names — proposed
Coverage
1 variable
obs_bio profile · one value per taxon at a sampling event · 9,270 values · 2004–2012 · 1 variable
Species and taxa
- Balaenoptera musculus Blue Whale 3090
- Balaenoptera physalus Fin Whale 3090
- Megaptera novaeangliae Humpback Whale 3090
Access
Every endpoint this dataset can be reached through, grouped by how you would use it. Each name is the link; the copy button beside it copies the address. Everything is in the release record and was answered when the release was cut.
Apps that read this dataset from the release. The icons after a name are the app’s lenses — the spatial grain it shows the data at.
Every way to have the bytes, by source. Nothing here asks you to register first.
Tables from the release (Parquet)
The release’s own tables, as the parquet objects it is frozen from — the same bytes every app and package below reads. A table this dataset shares with others holds every dataset’s rows, so filter on dataset_key; a partition holds only this dataset’s. since is the release whose rows these are: an unchanged table keeps its object.
From the provider
The dataset as its provider publishes it, before CalCOFI ingested it.
The same release, from a script or a browser SQL shell.
Packages
The whole release, pinned to a version, with the citation one call away.
con <- calcofi4r::cc_get_db()
calcofi4r::cc_cite("sio_cetacean-sonobuoy")
con = calcofi4py.cc_get_db()
calcofi4py.cc_cite("sio_cetacean-sonobuoy")
DuckDB, anywhere
No CalCOFI package needed: each table above is a plain parquet object, readable by any DuckDB (or Arrow, pandas, Spark) from its URL. The path carries a content hash — a table whose rows did not change between releases keeps the same object, so nothing unchanged is stored or downloaded twice. Swap in any table above; one shared with other datasets needs WHERE dataset_key = 'sio_cetacean-sonobuoy'. Every object of every release is listed in db-schema.
SELECT *
FROM read_parquet('https://storage.googleapis.com/calcofi-db/ducklake/tables/obs/dataset_key=sio_cetacean-sonobuoy/09009af8bfff2df6b3a0e661/data_0.parquet')
LIMIT 100;
db-query, in the browser
__TBL:obs__ is db-query’s name for the pinned release’s obs object — the hashed path above, resolved for you — so the same SQL keeps working when a release changes the object.
-- sio_cetacean-sonobuoy in the CalCOFI release v2026.10.05
SELECT *
FROM __TBL:obs__
WHERE dataset_key = 'sio_cetacean-sonobuoy'
LIMIT 100;
Records about the data, in the standards each portal harvests.
Where this dataset is registered outside calcofi.io: each portal’s role, what it is for, the dataset’s status there and the identifier it is known by. The policy — which portal is the archive of record and why — is in Portals.
Policy Archive of record: none known; the source is the lab's spreadsheet copied into CalCOFI/marmam-app.
Everything here is open — nothing on calcofi.io asks you to register first. If this dataset ends up in something you build or publish, register your use so it can be credited and linked back; to hear when a release changes it, stay informed. Questions: data@calcofi.io.
Cite
This dataset's own citation. What to cite, and how, is a chapter of the docs book.
The provider has not confirmed a citation for this dataset yet. Cite the release below, and name the dataset by its key.
CalCOFI Sonobuoy Baleen Whale Call Detections [dataset].
License: not yet established
BibTeX
@misc{sio_cetacean-sonobuoy,
title = {CalCOFI Sonobuoy Baleen Whale Call Detections},
note = {License: not yet established}
}
…and the release it came from
CalCOFI (2026). CalCOFI Integrated Database, release v2026.10.05 [Data set]. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA Fisheries, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife. https://calcofi.io/db-schema/?v=v2026.10.05
BibTeX
@misc{calcofi_release_v2026_10_05,
title = {CalCOFI Integrated Database, release v2026.10.05},
author = {CalCOFI},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA Fisheries, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife},
url = {https://calcofi.io/db-schema/?v=v2026.10.05}
}
Source files
The original inputs the ingest notebook read, archived by the ingest to the public files bucket — 1 file, 579 KB.
- acoustic-raw.csv579 KB2026-10-04