Microbarom
class of atmospheric infrasonic waves
In acoustics, microbaroms, also known as the "voice of the sea", are a class of atmospheric infrasonic waves generated in marine storms by a non-linear interaction of ocean surface waves with the atmosphere. They typically have narrow-band, nearly sinusoidal waveforms with amplitudes up to a few microbars, and wave periods near 5 seconds (0.2 hertz). Due to low atmospheric absorption at these low frequencies, microbaroms can propagate thousands of kilometers in the atmosphere, and can be readily detected by widely separated instruments on the Earth's surface.
History
The reason for the discovery of this phenomenon was an accident: aerologists working at marine hydrometeorology stations and watercraft drew attention to the strange pain that a person experiences when approaching the surface of a standard meteorological probe (a balloon filled with hydrogen). During one of the expeditions, this effect was demonstrated to the Soviet academician V. V. Shuleikin by the chief meteorologist V. A. Berezkin. This phenomenon drew genuine interest among scientists; in order to study it, special equipment was designed to record powerful but low-frequency vibrations that are not audible to human ears.
As a result of several series of experiments, the physical essence of this phenomenon was clarified and in 1935 when V.V. Shuleikin published his first work entirely devoted to the infrasonic nature of the “voice of the sea”. Microbaroms were first described in United States in 1939 by American seismologists Hugo Benioff and Beno Gutenberg at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, based on observations from an electromagnetic microbarograph, consisting of a wooden box with a low-frequency loudspeaker mounted on top.
They noted their similarity to microseisms observed on seismographs, and correctly hypothesized that these signals were the result of low pressure systems in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. In 1945, Swiss geoscientist L. Saxer showed the first relationship of microbaroms with wave height in ocean storms and microbarom amplitudes.
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