An improved transient-type ice-penetrating radar

Abstract

ABSTRACT. A low-cost, compact, short-pulse ice-penetrating radar (IPR) system with a center frequency of 50 MHz for sounding glacier topography is presented. The radar was developed to measure ice thickness and to image internal structures and basal conditions of glaciers and ice sheets with a maximum range of $16 000 ns and a depth resolution better than 2.5 m. The receiver of the IPR system employs asynchronous operation mode, avoiding the need for a cable between the transmitter and receiver. A new sampling technology using a high-speed field programmable gate array, which implements a 256-trace stacking algorithm to realize the analog-to-digital conversion, both simplifies the structure of the receiver and increases the sampling efficiency. The power consumption of the whole receiver is <1.5 W, which can be supplied by a laptop computer. Test measurements were made during the 5th China Expedition to the Grove Mountains in East Antarctica. Field tests show the capability of this system to measure ice thickness up to 650 m and to define internal layers within the ice body.

A compact lightweight multipurpose ground-penetrating radar for glaciological applications

“…Since the first proposals for ice- and snow-penetrating radars (Cook, 1960) and their field implementation by Evans and Smith (1969), there have been many innovations in radar design, including those of Matsuoka and others (2004), Mingo and Flowers (2010) and Ye and others (2011). In this paper we introduce a novel compact lightweight impulse ice-penetrating radar optimized for operating in a frequency range from 10 to 75 MHz (dependent on the antenna), with a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a high transmitter power, a long recording time window, very low power consumption and storage capacity that allows for continuous recording of >250000 radar traces (i.e.…”