Use of a porous material description of forests in infrasonic propagation algorithms

Abstract

Infrasound can propagate very long distances and remain at measurable levels. As a result infrasound sensing is used for remote monitoring in many applications. At local ranges, on the order of 10 km, the influence of the presence or absence of forests on the propagation of infrasonic signals is considered. Because the wavelengths of interest are much larger than the scale of individual components, the forest is modeled as a porous material. This approximation is developed starting with the relaxation model of porous materials. This representation is then incorporated into a Crank-Nicholson method parabolic equation solver to determine the relative impacts of the physical parameters of a forest (trunk size and basal area), the presence of gaps/trees in otherwise continuous forest/open terrain, and the effects of meteorology coupled with the porous layer. Finally, the simulations are compared to experimental data from a 10.9 kg blast propagated 14.5 km. Comparison to the experimental data shows that appropriate inclusion of a forest layer along the propagation path provides a closer fit to the data than solely changing the ground type across the frequency range from 1 to 30 Hz.