Detecting sound in the Arctic
Zach Zody, a research mechanical engineer with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), and Matt Kamrath, a CRREL research physical scientist, stand next to a multichannel microphone array and multichannel recorder in Fairbanks, Alaska. The team carried microphones and recording equipment across fields covered in four feet of snow to conduct experiments and collect data for developing new methods for detecting, localizing and identifying aerial drones. The effort was completed in order to determine the direction of sound and the way it travels through the atmosphere as well as the way sound interacts with terrain in hopes of finding new methods for extracting information from sound signals.