Array for acoustic tomography of the atmosphere

Tomography has been widely used in many fields of science, medicine and technology for remote sensing of different media. Acoustic tomography of the atmosphere allows one to reconstruct the three-dimensional temperature and velocity fields and to monitor their evolution in time. It was first employed in the 1990s. In this paper, we overview arrays for acoustic tomography of the atmosphere which have been employed so far. Furthermore, we describe an acoustic tomography array which is proposed to be built at the NOAA Environmental Technology Laboratory. The array will allow us to remotely measure the temperature and velocity fields in a volume with the size of about 40 m×40 m×6 m, located at several meters above the ground. No currently existing meteorological instrumentation allows one to do such measurements. The temperature and velocity fields which will be reconstructed with the use of this array are important for many applications: boundary layer meteorology; propagation of acoustic and electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere; experimental verification of large eddy simulation and direct numerical simulation; etc.