A Setup For Long Term Sound Propagation Measurements

There exists a big demand on well-defined sound propagation measurements. It is challenging to arrange data acquisition adequate for scientific purposes: tens of atmospheric and environmental factors should be monitored. Sound propagation is strongly affected by the weather conditions, but which are the most important factors? In this paper a fully automatized setup for long term sound propagation measurements is presented and problematics of observations are considered. Continuous measurements using state-of-the-art measurement facilities like SODAR and microphone arrays - producing over 100 factors hourly during a period of two years are behind and experience on implementation are considered too. The high level objective of these measurements was to create a statistical model working along with a competent physical model to achieve better accuracy and using it to evaluate uncertainties of modeling. The first hand objectives were to characterize and quantify the environmental factors which have effect on excess attenuation, sound propagation delay, and background noise captured by the microphones.