ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,399,056, issued on Aug. 26, was assigned to NEC Corp. (Tokyo).

"Snow / water level detection with distributed acoustic sensing integrated ultrasonic device" was invented by Sarper Ozharar (Pennington, N.J.), Yue Tian (Princeton, N.J.), Ting Wang (West Windsor, N.J.) and Yangmin Ding (East Brunswick, N.J.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Aspects of the present disclosure describe snow/water level detection using distributed fiber optic sensing/distributed acoustic sensing (DFOS/DAS) and an integrated ultrasonic device that advantageously operates over existing optical telecommunications facilities carrying live telecommunications traffic-or...