Use of ground penetrating radar for determination of water table depth and subsurface soil characteristics at Kennedy Space Center

Abstract

Sustainable use and management of natural resources require strategic responses using non-destructive tools to provide spatial and temporal data for decision making. Experiments conducted at John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) demonstrate ground penetrating radar (GPR) can provide high-resolution images showing depth to water tables. GPR data at KSC were acquired using a MALÅ Rough Terrain 100 MHz Antenna. Data indicate strong correlation (R 2 =0.80) between measured water table depth (shallow monitoring wells and soil auger) and GPR estimated depth. The study demonstrated the use of GPR to detect Holocene and Pleistocene depositional environments such as Anastasia Formation that consists of admixtures of sand, shell and coquinoid limestone at a depth of 20-25 ft. This corresponds well with the relatively strong reflections from 7.5 to 13 m (125-215 ns) in GPR images. Interpretations derived from radar data coupled with other non-GPR data (wells data and soil auger data) will aid in the understanding of climate change impacts due to sea level rise on the scrub vegetation composition at KSC. Climate change is believed to have a potentially significant impact potential on near coastal ground water levels and associated water table depth. Understanding the impacts of ground water levels changes will, in turn, lead to improved conceptual conservation efforts and identifications of climate change adaptation concepts related to the recovery of the Florida scrub jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens) and other endangered or threatened species which are directly dependent on a healthy near coastal scrub habitat. Transfer of this inexpensive and non-destructive technology to other areas at KSC, Florida, and to other countries, may prove useful in the development of future conservation programs.

Deciphering of karst geomorphology and sinkhole (doline) structures using multiple geophysical and geological methods (Trabzon, NE Türkiye)

“…In addition, there are zones of of subsurface objects by using the velocity of electromagnetic waves (Davis and Annan 1989). This method is also widely used for doline (Batayneh et al 2002;Leucci 2006;Kruse et al 2006;Delle Rose and Leucci 2010;Rodriguez et al 2014;Pandey et al 2019;Sevil et al 2017;Lago et al 2022;Hussain et al 2020), cave (McMechan et al 2002Şeren et al 2012;Martinez-Moreno et al 2013Lyskowski et al 2014;Gosar and Ceru 2016;Ceru et al 2018;Hussain et al 2020) and shallow groundwater exploration (Nakashima et al 2001;Gloaguen et al 2001;Doolittle et al 2006;Gomez-Ortiz et al 2009;Idi and Kamarudin 2011;Mahmoudzadeh et al 2012;Hengari et al 2013;Dhakate et al 2015;Kowalczyk et al 2018).…”

Evaluation of Moisture Damage under Crack-Sealed Asphalt Pavements in Louisiana

“…Figure 7 shows the final water levels in the side ditches and GWT elevation after calibration. To validate these results, the GPR line-scans at log-mile 1.6, shown in Figure 8, showed strong reflections at 0.6 m; these strong reflections are generally because of the GWT ( 29 ).…”

Spatiotemporal Variations in Snow and Soil Frost—A Review of Measurement Techniques

“…The radar can be operated from vehicles, such as helicopters, airplanes or snow mobiles and can thus cover large lateral distances in short times, or it can be mounted stationary and monitor temporal changes [61]. GPR-techniques have been applied to determine the spatial distribution of snow depths [74][75][76][77][78], snow density [77,79], SWE [80], snow layering and stratigraphy [78,81,82], wet snow properties [83], soil frost depth [84][85][86][87], depths to thawing front and shallow freeze and thaw processes [85,86,[88][89][90][91][92], soil water content [93,94] and depths to the water table [95,96].…”