Developing time-lapse ground-penetrating radar methods for spatio-temporal monitoring of subsurface flow processes

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jens Tronicke, since 5/2023
• Subject Area: Geophysics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 490646841

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is an established method for exploring the shallow subsurface. The success of this method is based on the possibility to generate structural images of the subsurface with relatively little effort, as they are needed to tackle archaeological, hydrological, engineering and geoscience related questions. Due to the acquisition speed of this method it is possible to explore a survey area several times in a short period (time-lapse measurement) and thus to continuously monitoring the underground. The results of such time-lapse measurements are especially helpful for the understanding of hydrological problems, such as the imaging of fast preferential flow paths. Although several studies have demonstrated the successful application of time-lapse GPR surveying, there is so far no systematic investigation to which detail processes can be imaged and which processing and interpretation routines are required. In this project the possibilities and limitations of time-lapse GPR data will be investigated by means of synthetic and field GPR experiments. Therefore, we intend to generate synthetic time-lapse GPR data on the basis of physical hydrological modeling results. Furthermore, selected experiments will be performed to analyze realistic GPR noise patterns and add them to the models. The model results will provide test cases for the stability of the existing time-lapse GPR processing and interpretation routines.Furthermore, we will develop new processing and interpretation routines based on local cross-correlation and attribute-based data interpretation. Since such methods are already applied successfully in modern reflection seismic data interpretation, they represent promising evaluation methods which are not yet used for the interpretation of time-lapse GPR data. These methods will be tested on the modeled time-lapse GPR data and applied to newly collected GPR field data. The main goals of the project are therefore: (i) generating realistic synthetic time-lapse GPR data. (ii) developing new processing and evaluation routines for the analysis of time-lapse GPR data. (iii) applying the developed routines to newly collected time-lapse GPR data of a hydrological field experiment.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Conrad Jackisch
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Niklas Allroggen, until 5/2023