Efficient Electromagnetic Imaging of an Artificial Infiltration Process in the Vadose Zone Using Cross-Borehole Radar

Cross-borehole ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has been widely used to characterize the shallow subsurface and to monitor hydrogeologic processes. To investigate an infiltration process in the vadose zone, an artificial groundwater infiltration test was conducted in Nagaoka, Japan. Time-lapse cross-borehole GPR data were collected using zero-offset profiling (ZOP) mode. The infiltration process was observed as a variation of GPR traveltimes, which can be transformed into a dielectric constant, and further converted to volumetric water content. A standard ZOP analysis, for which all first arrivals are assumed to be direct waves, results in an underestimation of the dielectric constant because of the existence of critically refracted waves. This letter presents an efficient algorithm using the maximum first-cycle amplitude to approximately determine the traveltime of direct arrival, deriving a dielectric constant model more accurately than the standard ZOP analysis from ZOP data. Tests on synthetic and real field data show that the proposed approach is effective in building accurate water content profile without iterative calculations as in the standard ZOP analysis.