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Name: Brett V.
Status: student
Age: 14
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Thursday, November 28, 2002
Question:
Is there any formula to find out the rate of speed change for the speed of sound as the altitude rises?

Replies:
The short answer is that it does not change very much because the variables (temperature, density, pressure) tend to cancel. There is an atmospheric model called the "standard atmosphere 1976" which you can search and find calculators on-line that lets you compute various atmospheric parameters as a function of altitude. One parameter is the speed of sound. One on-line source that is linked to several other web pages can be found at:

http://www.digitaldutch.com/atmoscalc/index.htm

Vince Calder

NASA has a web page on this topic. See

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/sound.html

Tim Mooney


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