Spectral enhancement of GPR data: Some practical considerations

In a variety of applications, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) reflection data are routinely used to explore the shallow underground. Processing such GPR data largely relies on concepts adapted from reflection seismology. However, seismic processing tools employed to enhance the spectral content and, thus, the vertical resolution of the data are rarely found in GPR processing flows. One major reason is the mixed-phase nature of typical GPR wavelets, which limits the success of common seismic deconvolution routines. Here, we investigate the applicability of spectral balancing and the recently proposed differential resolution method for the spectral enhancement of GPR data. Using synthetic and field examples, we evaluate the performance of these rather simple and computationally efficient approaches. Although these methods can be regarded as rather ad hoc approaches lacking methodological rigor, our results demonstrate the benefit of considering such easy-to-implement approaches when processing GPR data in a routine fashion.