Green’s Function Extraction from Atmospheric Acoustic Propagation

Acoustic waves propagating in the atmosphere may undergo many effects including refraction by temperature and wind velocity gradients, scattering by atmospheric turbulence, absorption by the atmosphere (fluid), diffraction by terrain features, and absorption and reflection by a porous ground. As a result, there may be insonification in acoustic shadow zones, amplitude and phase fluctuations of the propagating sound signals, loss of signal coherence, changes in the interference maxima and minima of the direct ground reflected waves, and multipath effects. Understanding these effects is important for a variety of military applications, such as acoustic source localization and classification, noise propagation in the atmosphere, and the development of new remote sensing techniques of the atmosphere.