Ground penetrating radar for groundwater prospecting in Eresfjord, central Norway.

Abstract

Crosshole ground penetrating radar (GPR) tomography has been widely used and has the potential to improve the obtained subsurface models due to its high spatial resolution compared to other methods. Recent advances in full-waveform inversion of crosshole GPR data show that higher resolution images can be obtained compared to conventional ray-based GPR inversion because it can exploit all information present in the observed data. Since the first application of full-waveform inversion on synthetic and experimental GPR data, the algorithm has been significantly improved by extending the scalar to a vectorial approach, and changing the stepped permittivity and conductivity update into a simultaneous update. Here, we introduce new normalized gradients that do not depend on the number of sources and receivers which enable a comparison of the gradients and step lengths for different crosshole survey layouts. An experimental data set acquired at the Boise Hydrogeophysics Research Site is inverted using different source–receiver setups and the obtained permittivity and conductivity images, remaining gradients and final misfits are compared for the different versions of the full-waveform inversion. Moreover, different versions of the full-waveform inversion are applied to obtain an overview of all improvements. Most improvements result in a reducing final misfit between the measured and synthetic data and a reducing remaining gradient at the final iteration. Regions with relatively high remaining gradient amplitudes indicate less reliable inversion results. Comparison of the final full-waveform inversion results with Neutron–Neutron porosity log data and capacitive resistivity log data show considerably higher spatial frequencies for the logging data compared to the full-waveform inversion results. To enable a better comparison, we estimated a simple wavenumber filter and the full-waveform inversion results show an improved fit with the logging data. This work shows the potential of full-waveform inversion as an advanced method that can provide high resolution images to improve hydrological models.