Drone-mounted GPR surveying: flight-height considerations for diffraction-based velocity analysis

Recent studies highlight the potential of the drone platform for ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveying. Most guidance for optimising drone flight-heights is based on maximising the image quality of target responses, but no study yet considers the impact on diffraction travel-times. Strong GPR velocity contrasts across the air-ground interface introduce significant refraction effects that distort diffraction hyperbolae and introduce errors into diffraction-based velocity analysis. The severity of these errors is explored with synthetic GPR responses, using ray- and finite-difference approaches, and a real GPR dataset acquired over a sequence of diffracting features buried up to 1 m in the ground. Throughout, GPR antennas with 1000 MHz centre-frequency are raised from the ground to heights < 0.9 m (0-3 times the wavelength in air). Velocity estimates are within +10% of modelled values (spanning 0.07-0.13 m/ns) if the antenna height is within ½ wavelength of the ground surface. Greater heights reduce diffraction curvature, damaging velocity precision and masking diffractions against a background of subhorizontal reflectivity. Real GPR data highlight further problems of the drone-based platform, with data dominated by reverberations in the air-gap and reduced spatial resolution of wavelets at target depth. We suggest that a drone-based platform is unsuitable for diffraction-based velocity analysis, and any future drone surveys are benchmarked against ground-coupled datasets.

Polarity Change Extraction of GPR Data for Under-road Cavity Detection: Application on Sudeoksa Testbed Data

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the most widely used geophysical survey methods to locate cavities under roads due to its speedy exploration and high-resolution imaging. To locate underground cavities using GPR, we need to distinguish between cavity-induced reflections and other reflections, which can be achieved by examining the polarity change in reflections compared to the polarity of the transmitted signal. The polarity change can be measured from the phase shift between the target and first reflections. To estimate the phase shift in reflections, the method of computing the power spectrum difference between the original trace and background signal was proposed, but the method has a limitation for shallow reflectors. As an alternative method to avoid this limitation, we propose using only one component of the power spectrum difference, the cross-correlation between the target reflection and background signal. The cross-correlation has its maximum peak at a time lag between the target and first reflection (from the air-ground interface). Additionally, the phase at that time lag represents a phase shift between the two reflections. We compare our cross-correlation-based method with the conventional method of computing the whole power spectrum difference and investigate the feasibility of our method for distinguishing cavity-induced reflections using a 2D field data set acquired in a testbed in Sudeoksa, Korea.

Nitrogen Oxides under the Urban Forest Crown Cover: Migration, Transformation, Real and Possible Environmental Consequences

Has been presented the authors’ development demonstrating the possibility for determining the atmospheric air pollution in urban forest’s various areas by «passive» dosimetry’s methods. On the example of nitrogen oxides have been analyzed causes and consequences for technogenic pollution of forest ecosystems in urbanized areas. The study conducted on the territory of the Kuntsevskaya dacha’s spruce forest which is the part of the natural reserve «The Setun River’s Valley» (Moscow) has shown that in certain areas within a forest range, nitrogen dioxide accumulation in the air-ground interface can occur. Have been revealed the signs of increased nitrogen status for the investigated forest ecosystem.

Application of Coupled-Wave Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin Approximation to Ground Penetrating Radar

This paper deals with bistatic subsurface probing of a horizontally layered dielectric half-space by means of ultra-wideband electromagnetic pulses. A receiver collects reflections from the air-ground interface and from the gradients of dielectric permittivity in the half-space. This scenario is of interest for ground penetrating radar (GPR) applications. For the analytical description of the received signal, we developed and implemented a novel time-domain version of the coupled-wave Wentzel&ndash;Kramers&ndash;Brillouin approximation. Our solution is in very good agreement with finite-difference time-domain results, radically accelerates calculations, and effectively accounts for the protracted return signals observed in the lower part of the GPR spectrum. The paper includes results showing the application of the proposed technique to two case studies: in particular, the method was employed for the post-processing of experimental radargrams collected on Lake Chebarkul, in Russia, and to simulate GPR probing of the Moon surface, to detect smooth gradients of the dielectric permittivity in lunar regolith.

A Stochastic Analysis of the Transient Current Induced along the Thin Wire Scatterer Buried in a Lossy Medium

The paper deals with the stochastic collocation analysis of a time domain response of a straight thin wire scatterer buried in a lossy half-space. The wire is excited either by a plane wave transmitted through the air-ground interface or by an equivalent current source representing direct lightning strike pulse. Transient current induced at the center of the wire, governed by corresponding Pocklington integrodifferential equation, is determined analytically. This antenna configuration suffers from uncertainties in various parameters, such as ground properties, wire dimensions, and position. The statistical processing of the results yields additional information, thus enabling more accurate and efficient analysis of buried wire configurations.