Propagation of vertical shock waves in the atmosphere

Modeling the propagation of shock waves is a major problem for studies of wave propagation in the atmosphere because of the exponential amplification of the wave amplitude during the vertical propagation. The waves generated by pulse sources at the ground can have shock wave characteristics upon reaching the upper layers of the atmosphere. This paper proposes a new computation method based on studies of shock propagation in ray tubes for laboratory experiments and attempts to adapt this method to atmospheric propagation. This nonlinear approach shows reflections from the stratospheric temperature increase that were not predicted by the linear acoustic theory for the same atmospheric model. The nonlinear computations also predicts focusing of the rays at mesospheric altitudes.