The identification test of soil texture with ground penetrating radar

The detection of soil texture needs nondestructive methods. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) develops fast in the fields of geological and agricultural survey in the recent years. To get a quantitative recognition of soil texture, experiments were designed with GPR of 500 MHz and 250 MHz frequency. Fine sand, sieved soil and natural soil were selected and tested indoors to acquire basic soil properties, amplitude attenuation characteristics and speed of electromagnetic wave. Compared to the experimental results outdoors, soil texture in the spots can be identified and classified. The strong signal changes only happened at the surface of the medium. The study results also showed GPR could recognize silt loam and sand loam, which help us analyze the effects of soil texture on soil dielectric characteristics in the further research.