A highly portable, lightweight windscreen for infrasound sensors

Abstract

It is often desired to deploy infrasound sensors in remote locations for short periods of time. Because of noise created by wind flow past the sensor in the atmosphere at infrasound frequencies, it is also desirable to employ a mechanical windscreen with the goal of reducing the effect of the wind so as to enhance the acoustic signal-to-noise ratio. One of the challenges in wind screen design for temporary applications is to achieve reasonable portability in addition to adequate wind noise filtering. In this presentation, we report the performance a new windscreen design that is highly portable and that achieves performance on par with a commonly used dome-shaped windscreen. Performance comparisons of this newly designed windscreen, a typical porous hose windscreen, and a commonly used dome windscreen are investigated. Specifically, wind noise reduction of these three windscreens compared with a un-screened sensor are presented as a function of frequency and wavenumber using the measured wind speed as a proxy for wave speed. Additionally, acoustic signal noise attenuation is also examined so as to compare signal-to-noise ratio gains. This investigation is similar to the one presented by Alberts, Ludwig, and Talmadge (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 137, 2261 (2015)) for other small windscreens.