Numerical simulation of acoustic tomography of the atmosphere

A state-of-the-art array for acoustic travel time tomography of the atmosphere is under construction by several organizations in the U.S. The array will allow the estimation of the temperature and wind velocity fields within a tomographic volume located a few meters above the ground with a horizontal size of about 80 m. This paper is devoted to numerical simulation of acoustic travel time tomography of the atmosphere. The temperature and velocity fields within the tomographic volume are modeled with the use of quasi-wavelets and Large Eddy Simulation. Then, the travel times of sound propagation between different pairs of sources and receivers of the tomography array are calculated. Given these travel times, three algorithms for reconstruction of the temperature and velocity fields are employed: the cell approach, basis function approach, and stochastic approach. It is shown that the first of these approaches allows us to reliably estimate the mean temperature and velocity vector within the tomographic volume, while the other two give a good reconstruction of fluctuations in the temperature and velocity with respect to their mean values. [Work supported by ARO, Grants DAAD19-03-1-0104 and DAAD19-03-1-0341.]