Waveform (Infrasound) Interpretation (3)
Seismology in the atmosphere is much easier to model for the following reasons:
1)The atmosphere is a fluid and only supports P-wave or compressional waves
2)The atmosphere is largely devoid of scatterers (at least for infrasonic wavelengths)
3)The atmosphere is relatively isotropic (i.e., the velocity structure is relatively homogeneous) at least for local recorded acoustic energy.
4)The atmosphere is a relatively low dissipative medium (i.e, attenuation for infrasonic wavelengths is negligible for locally recorded infrasound.
As a result, infrasonic Green’s functions are simple and what we record is very often similar to the original source-time function
*                      *                            =
S(t)               G(t)                 I(t)          W(t)