By Peter Weiss
A hush falls over a snowy landscape. That’s because snow mutes sounds passing over it. A U.S. Army researcher has devised a way to use that phenomenon to measure important characteristics of the snow itself.
Possible uses for the new technique range from curbing noise pollution to tracking the winter activities of hostile military forces, says its inventor Donald G. Albert of the Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H.