A review of snow acoustics

Snow acoustics can be divided into two major areas. One is the attempt to understand the acoustic properties of snow and to relate them to other material properties. In this area the major advance has been the recent understanding that snow must be treated as a porous medium and that the ice framework, the pore air, and their interaction all play important roles in acoustic propagation. It appears that a more realistic model of the ice framework must be used before the full range of snow's acoustic properties can be modeled adequately. The second area is acoustic emissions. High‐frequency acoustic emissions have aided in the development of a texture‐oriented constitutive relationship. Low‐frequency acoustic emissions have been shown to have the potential for predicting avalanches, at least under some conditions.