A New Drone-Borne GPR for Soil Moisture Mapping
(2019) Near Surface Geoscience & 10th International Workshop on Advanced Ground Penetrating Radar (IWAGPR2019) — Location: The Hague, The Netherlands (8.September.2019)
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- Abstract
- We present a new drone-borne ground-penetrating radar (GPR) for soil moisture mapping. The GPR system is lightweight, <1.5 kg, and consists of a vector network analyzer (VNA) as frequency-domain radar, a hybrid horn-dipole antenna operating in the range 250-2800 MHz, a microcomputer for controlling the radar, a smartphone or tablet for remote control, and a GPS for positioning. Radar data processing is performed using full-wave inversion based on the method of Lambot et al. As a proof of concept, we present the results of a data acquisition over an agricultural field in Saint-Denis, Belgium. For this example, we used the 500-700 MHz frequency range and inversion was performed in the time domain, focusing on the soil surface reflection. The retrieved permittivity was converted into soil moisture values using Topp’s equation. The soil moisture map was constructed using kriging. The obtained results were very consistent with the soil topography map, with higher soil moisture values observed in the talwegs and lower values observed in the highest slopes. Although the method still requires a few improvements before being routinely applicable, the method appears to be very flexible and promising for a series of drone applications, including precision agriculture and environmental engineering.
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Citations
Wu, K., Arambulo Rodriguez, G., Zajc, M., Jacquemin, E., Clément, M., De Coster, A., & Lambot, S. (2019). A New Drone-Borne GPR for Soil Moisture Mapping. EAGE Special Publication. Published. Near Surface Geoscience & 10th International Workshop on Advanced Ground Penetrating Radar (IWAGPR2019), The Hague, The Netherlands. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/61059 (Original work published 2019)