Application of Microwave Tomography in Hydrogeophysics: Some Examples

Abstract

We have developed a new strategy for indirect measurement of the dielectric permittivity of the soil using ground penetrating radar (GPR) data. In particular, the GPR data are provided as field scattered by a pipe buried in the soil; the scattered field data is collected at the air–soil interface and under a multimonostatic configuration (B‐scan). The strategy is based on the use of a microwave tomographic approach that achieves more robust results with respect to the simple calculation of the round‐trip time of the signal. Preliminary results are presented with synthetic data, achieved by means of a finite‐difference time‐domain code, for both the simple case of a pipe buried in a homogeneous soil and the more complicated case of multiple pipes in a layered medium.

Ground-penetrating Radar Prospection at the Jesuits' Church in Valletta, Malta

“…In particular, this is true for small targets (Soldovieri et al, 2008). But, for large scatterers, we cannot exclude more tricky effects, due e.g.…”

Interference Mitigation Achieved with a Reconfigurable Stepped Frequency GPR System

“…The propagation velocity has been evaluated equal to 0.08 m/ns according not only to the diffraction hyperbolas [15] but also according to a sequential migration [16] based on heuristic trials and visualizations of the relative results [17].…”

“…The data in Figure 2 have been processed with the Reflexw commercial code [14] according to a sequence processing composed by zero timing, background removal, gain vs. depth, one dimensional filtering, and Kirchoff migration. The propagation velocity has been evaluated equal to 0.08 m/ns according not only to the diffraction hyperbolas [15] but also according to a sequential migration [16] based on heuristic trials and visualizations of the relative results [17]. From the data, a two-layer structure of the soil is evident, and we have reasons to suspect also some horizontal variation of the characteristics of the soil.…”

A strategy for the determination of the dielectric permittivity of a lossy soil exploiting GPR surface measurements and a cooperative target

“…In a previous paper by Soldovieri et al (2008a), we have presented a strategy to retrieve the dielectric permittivity of the soil starting from GPR measurements at the air/soil interface. This method is funded on a microwave tomography approach (Persico et al, 2005;Cui and Chew, 2002;Hansen and Johansen, 2000;Meincke 2001;Soldovieri et al, 2008b), and exploits Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) data over a buried target with a transverse section that is electrically small.…”