Acoustic scattering from a thermally driven buoyant plume revisited.

Far-field weak scattering theory is applied to the case of high-frequency broad-bandwidth acoustic scattering from a thermally generated buoyant plume in a controlled laboratory environment. To first order, the dominant scattering mechanism is thermally driven sound-speed variations that are related to temperature deviations from ambient. As a result, the received complex acoustic scattering is a measure of the one-component three-dimensional Fourier transform of the temperature difference field measured at the Bragg wave number.