Acoustic travel-time tomography of temperature and wind velocity fields in the atmosphere

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2006-11, Vol.120 (5_Supplement), p.3336-3336
• Main Authors: Ostashev, Vladimir E., Vecherin, Sergey N., Wilson, D. Keith, Ziemann, Astrid, Barth, Manuela, Arnold, Klaus
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4781298

Acoustic tomography of the atmosphere allows one to reconstruct (estimate) temperature and wind velocity fields in the atmosphere and to monitor the evolution of these turbulent fields in time. In the present paper, we report on a progress in construction of a state-of-the-art array for acoustic tomography of the atmosphere, which will allow us to measure travel times of sound propagation between different pairs of sources and receivers within a few meters above the ground. Using these travel times, the turbulent fields will then be reconstructed using different inversion algorithms. The array is being built at the Boulder Atmospheric Observatory, CO, in a collaborative effort between several organizations in the U.S. Furthermore, we discuss several inverse algorithms for estimation of the turbulent fields, including recently developed time-dependent stochastic inversion. Finally, some of these algorithms were used to reconstruct temperature and wind velocity fields in indoor and outdoor tomography experiments carried out by scientists from the Institute of Meteorology, University of Leipzig, Germany. Examples of the reconstructed fields are given. [Work supported by ARO, Grants DAAD19-03-1-0104 and W911NF-06-1-0007.]