Acoustic Remote Sensing

The use of conventional instrumentation to measure mean winds, temperature, humidity, and turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer, coupled with advances in numerical modeling methods, has led to great improvements in our understanding of this region of the atmosphere. Coincident with these advances has been the development of a variety of remote-sensing devices. Exploiting the interaction of acoustic, radio, and light waves with the atmosphere’s turbulent microstructure, these devices have provided a new means to measure and visualize the physical processes that govern the structure and evolution of the lower atmosphere. In this article, we describe the development and application of acoustic sounding methods to these studies.