Effect of randomly varying impedance on the interference of the direct and ground-reflected waves

A randomly varying ground impedance is introduced into the solution for the sound field produced by a point source in a homogeneous atmosphere above a flat ground. The results show that in general the ground with a random impedance cannot be represented by an effective, non-random impedance. The behavior of the solution is studied with a relaxation model for the impedance in which porosity and the static flow resistivity are random variables. Mean values and standard deviations are adopted from measurements of two types of ground surfaces. For both surfaces, the mean intensity of the sound field above a random-impedance ground deviates only slightly from the intensity above a non-random impedance. The normalized standard deviation of intensity fluctuations can, however, be greater than one, thus indicating that for a particular realization of the random impedance, the sound intensity might significantly deviate from the intensity for a non-random impedance.