ASA 124th Meeting New Orleans 1992 October

2pPA11. The healing distance of steady-state shock waves in the atmosphere.

Richard Raspet

Henry Bass

Lixin Yao

Dept. of Phys. and Astron., Univ. of Mississippi, University, MS 38677

Wenliang Wu

Univ. of Mississippi, University, MS 38677

The Anderson algorithm has been used to calculate the time development and rise time of transient shock waves in the atmosphere. This algorithm has been applied to square pulses in order to investigate the healing distance of steady-state shocks perturbed by turbulent scattering. Perturbed 100-Pa shocks require on the order of 1.0-km travel distance to return to within 10% of their steady shock rise time. For 30-Pa shocks the minimum recovery distance increases to 3.0 km. It is unlikely that finite wave effects can remove the longer rise times and irregular features introduced into the sonic boom by turbulent scattering in the planetary boundary layer.