Influence of mesoscale meteorological observations on near shore excess attenuation prediction

Abstract

This work focuses on numerical modeling of atmospheric sound propagation in a near-shore environment that is informed by concurrent meteorological observations. The atmospheric acoustic measurement layout places the source approximately 500 m from shore with one acoustic receiver array at the shoreline and a second acoustic receiver array approximately 350 m inland. The space between the shoreline and the inland receiver array consists of highly uniform marsh grass vegetation. The concurrent meteorological observations include high resolution temperature profiling at two locations (one over land and one over water) along with scanning Doppler LIDAR wind profiling measurements in the source-to-receiver direction. These meteorological measurements inform the input parameters used in a parabolic equation solver. The numerical predictions are compared to the measured transmission loss values to evaluate model sensitivity to input parameters.