Soil-moisture monitoring of test sites: Development of a soil-moisture monitoring system for landmine and IED detection test sites. The aim is to determine the moisture distribution by means of non-destructive surface-based GPR measurements.
Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) sensors have long been used to non-invasively detect buried objects in soils. The detection performance of GPR sensors is subject to multiple factors and is strongly affected by the soils water content. In this project we study how water content profiles in soils can non-invasively be determined from the surface. For this purpose we take advantage of the relationship between the propagation velocity of the radar waves and the water content. Different kinds of objects, like metal plates, were buried at different depths and the reflected waves from multiple GPR antennas were recorded. The propagation velocity and thereby also the soils water content was determined via relative traveltime differences as well as the form of diffraction hyperbolas. The results show that a combined usage of both methods is necessary to determine the propagation velocity in shallow (< 20cm) and deeper soil layers.