Towards high-quality X-59 sonic thump measurements

Brigham Young University has been studying questions related to NASA X-59 community noise testing. A summary of the key findings and recommendations to date are presented. Among these are weather-resistant ground microphone setups that reduce wind noise, methods for treating the problem of ambient noise contamination on sonic boom metrics and spectra, and the turbulence-induced variability seen over relatively small-aperture arrays. Also discussed are recommendations for data post-processing, e.g., employing a digital pole-shifting filter and zero-padding to improve the fidelity and smoothness of low-frequency spectral data. Finally, the relative merits of various sonic boom metrics are considered. Although Perceived Level has been the most widely-used metric, it is relatively sensitive to ambient noise contamination and turbulence-induced variability. [Work supported by NASA Langley Research Center through the National Institute of Aerospace.]