Radar Measurement of Surface Water Content Dynamics Under Wheat Canopy

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) with a suspended 1 GHz horn antenna was deployed for measurement of soil water contents and dwarf wheat canopy reflections over bare and electrically terminating surfaces. Surface reflection (SR) magnitudes and propagation times (PI) were used to independently calculate bulk soil dielectric constant and soil water contents. Measurements over wheat canopy shows that while SR and reflection coefficient values were strongly altered by canopy biomass, PT measurements remain unaffected. Wheat canopy influence on SR gradually intensified during the growth season until the canopy was removed and SR-based measurements rejoined with PT data. Horn-antenna radar measurements over natural surfaces offer a promise for remote truthing of radar data collected from air- and spaceborne platforms, and they may be used in the field for water content and vegetation biomass measurements

Assessing the Perspectives of Ground Penetrating Radar for Precision Farming

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development highlighted the importance of adopting sustainable agricultural practices to mitigate the threat posed by climate change to food systems around the world, to provide wise water management and to restore degraded lands. At the same time, it suggested the benefits and advantages brought by the use of near-surface geophysical measurements to assist precision farming, in particular providing information on soil variability at both vertical and horizontal scales. Among such survey methodologies, Ground Penetrating Radar has demonstrated its effectiveness in soil characterisation as a consequence of its sensitivity to variations in soil electrical properties and of its additional capability of investigating subsurface stratification. The aim of this contribution is to provide a comprehensive review of the current use of the GPR technique within the domain of precision irrigation, and specifically of its capacity to provide detailed information on the within-field spatial variability of the textural, structural and hydrological soil properties, which are needed to optimize irrigation management, adopting a variable-rate approach to preserve water resources while maintaining or improving crop yields and their quality. For each soil property, the review analyses the commonly adopted operational and data processing approaches, highlighting advantages and limitations

Improving soil moisture profile reconstruction from ground-penetrating radar data: a maximum likelihood ensemble filter approach

The vertical profile of shallow unsaturated zone soil moisture plays a key role in many hydro-meteorological and agricultural applications. We propose a closed-loop data assimilation procedure based on the maximum likelihood ensemble filter algorithm to update the vertical soil moisture profile from time-lapse ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data. A hydrodynamic model is used to propagate the system state in time and a radar electromagnetic model and petrophysical relationships to link the state variable with the observation data, which enables us to directly assimilate the GPR data. Instead of using the surface soil moisture only, the approach allows to use the information of the whole soil moisture profile for the assimilation. We validated our approach through a synthetic study. We constructed a synthetic soil column with a depth of 80 cm and analyzed the effects of the soil type on the data assimilation by considering 3 soil types, namely, loamy sand, silt and clay. The assimilation of GPR data was performed to solve the problem of unknown initial conditions. The numerical soil moisture profiles generated by the Hydrus-1D model were used by the GPR model to produce the "observed" GPR data. The results show that the soil moisture profile obtained by assimilating the GPR data is much better than that of an open-loop forecast. Compared to the loamy sand and silt, the updated soil moisture profile of the clay soil converges to the true state much more slowly. Decreasing the update interval from 60 down to 10 h only slightly improves the effectiveness of the GPR data assimilation for the loamy sand but significantly for the clay soil. The proposed approach appears to be promising to improve real-time prediction of the soil moisture profiles as well as to provide effective estimates of the unsaturated hydraulic properties at the field scale from time-lapse GPR measurements

Földradar (GPR) alapú talajnedvességtartalom-mérési lehetőségek földművek esetén – szakirodalmi áttekintés

A hajlékony pályaszerkezetek korai meghibásodásának és degradációjának egyik fő forrása a víz fokozott jelenléte annak rétegeiben, így a talajnedvesség-tartalom pontos mérése és változásának meghatározása kulcsfontosságú, mivel ezek jelentős hatással vannak a talaj teherbírására és alakváltozási jellemzőire, így befolyásolják a pályaszerkezetek stabilitását, süllyedését, valamint a talajvíz áramlását is. Kiemelt fontosságú a környezeti jellemzők alaposabb vizsgálata az alsóbbrendű, a mezőgazdasági utak, valamint az agro-erdészeti rendszerek kiszolgáló útjainál, illetve az erdők feltáróhálózatánál. Ezeknél az úthálózatoknál az időjárásnak való kitettség erőteljesebben érezteti hatását a vékonyabb pályaszerkezet miatt. A földmű feladata a pályaszerkezet megfelelő alátámasztásának biztosítása, ezért kialakításánál a kedvezőtlen éghajlati és terhelési viszonyok között is kellő stabilitást kell megvalósítani. Következésképpen az egész pályaszerkezet-rendszer elsősorban a földmű szilárdságától függ, és biztosítja a terhelések hatékony elosztását a mélység mentén. A földmű állapotának felmérése és időbeli változásának nyomon követése értékes információkat szolgáltat a pályaszerkezet-hibákról, ezáltal előrejelzést ad a jövőben szükséges útfenntartásról. A talajnedvesség-tartalom változásainak monitorozására a földmű kialakítása gyors, roncsolásmentes módszert igényelhet. A földradar (GPR) egy olyan roncsolásmentes műszer, amellyel a földművek minőségi felmérése, valamint a nedvesség okozta pályaszerkezetkárok értékelése is kivitelezhető. Az eljárás a pályaszerkezet felszínén még nem észlelhető súlyos károk megelőzésére is használható. Jelen cikk célja szakirodalmi áttekintést adni a GPR alapú talajnedvesség-tartalom meghatározás lehetőségeiről, a földművek esetében és a legalaposabban kutatott módszerek részletes bemutatása

In-Soil Measuring of Sugar Beet Yield Using UWB Radar Sensor System

Yield mapping is a basic entity of the Precision Farming concept and provides crucial information about the success of cultivation. Several approaches to site-specific yield recording during the sugar beet harvest are known. Most of them are based on the weighing of sugar beets together with soil tare. Another real-time yield mapping approach with the option of plant population counting is based on estimating the mass of individual sugar beets on the basis of their maximal diameter. The main goal of the research was to develop and evaluate a yield recording procedure based on radar technology, which will provide non-invasive in-soil detection and identification of single sugar beets in order to enable the counting of individual sugar beets and determining of the single sugar beet root mass. Further goals were to enhance the radar technology for other applications in the agriculture, as a general goal, and to define applicability restrictions of practical utilisation of the system for the sugar beet and similar crops. The research activities have been divided into laboratory and field experiments. The results of the laboratory experiments have provided valuable information about the measuring system’s behaviour, which enabled the successful field measurements. The used method allowed the identification and detection of 90% to 96% of sugar beets under test in the various field conditions, with correlation coefficients between real sugar beet positions and detected positions of about 99%, and average positioning error from 1,1 to 3,6 cm. The correlation coefficients between single sugar beet root masses and recorded reflected energy amounts were for the majority of tests over 70%, and the best results have been on the level close to 90%. This project was a joint venture of the Institute for Agricultural Engineering from Bonn and the Technical University of Ilmenau.Teilflächenspezifische Ertragsmessung von Zuckerrüben im Boden mittels UWB Radarsensorsystem Die Ertragskartierung ist ein wesentlicher Bestandteil des Konzeptes „Precision Farming“. Die Erntemasse von Kulturpflanzen ist für den Landwirt eine elementare Information über den Erfolg pflanzbaulicher Maßnahmen. Es sind mehrere Verfahren zur Ertragsermittlung von Zuckerrüben während der Ernte mit dem Bezug auf Teilflächen bekannt. Ein sensorischer Ansatz besteht in der Pflanzenzählung und Ermittlung der Masse der einzelnen Zuckerrüben über den maximalen Durchmesser. Das Hauptziel dieser Forschungsarbeiten war die Entwicklung und Bewertung eines berührungslosen Ertragserfassungssystems für Zuckerrüben, das teilflächenbasiert eine Zählung und Massebestimmung der Einzelrüben ermöglicht. Die weiteren Ziele bestanden in der Weiterentwicklung der Radartechnologie für andere Einsatzgebiete der Landwirtschaft und in der Bestimmung der Anwendbarkeitsgrenzen des Systems für Zuckerrüben und ähnliche Wurzelfrüchte. Die Forschungsaktivitäten fanden im Labor und unter Feldbedingungen auf Versuchsparzellen eines typischen Zuckerrübenstandortes statt. Die Ergebnisse unter Laborbedingungen lieferten wertvolle Informationen, die erfolgreiche Feldmessungen ermöglicht haben. Die angewendete Methode hat in unterschiedlichen Messbedingungen eine 90% bis 96% erfolgreiche Zuckerrübenidentifikation ermöglicht, mit Korrelationskoeffizienten zwischen tatsächlichen und detektierten Zuckerrübenpositionen von um 99% und einem durchschnittlichen Positionierungsfehler von 1,1 bis 3,6 cm. Die Korrelationskoeffizienten zwischen der Einzelrübenmasse und der gemessenen reflektierten Energiemenge lagen im Bereich von über 70% und die besten Ergebnisse erreichten Werte von 90%. Das Projekt wurde in der Zusammenarbeit des Instituts für Landtechnik Bonn und des Instituts für Kommunikations- und Messtechnik der Technischen Universität Ilmenau durchgeführt

Estimation of surface soil moisture by a multi-elevation UAV-based ground penetrating radar

The measurement of soil moisture is important for a wide range of applications, including ecosystem conservation and agricultural management. However, most traditional measurement methods, e.g., time-domain reflectometry (TDR), are unsuitable for mapping field scale variability. In this study, we propose a method that uses an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to support a ground penetrating radar (GPR) system for spatial scanning investigation at different elevations above ground level. This method measures the surface reflectivity to estimate the soil moisture, exploiting the linear relationship between the ratio of the reflected and the direct wave amplitudes along with the reciprocal of GPR antenna height. This relationship is deduced in this study based on the point source assumptions of a transmitter antenna and ground reflections, which is confirmed by numerical simulation results using the gprMax software. Unlike previous air-launched GPR methods, the UAV-GPR method presented here removes the limitations of a steady transmitter power and a fixed GPR survey height and the need for calibration of antenna transfer functions and geophysical inversion calculations, and thus is simpler and more convenient for field applications. We test the method at field sites within the riparian zone and a river-island grassland adjacent to the Yangtze River. The results from the field study illustrate comparable measured soil moisture to those obtained invasively using TDR. The root mean square error (RMSE) of surface reflectivity and soil moisture values between UAV-GPR with 8 antenna height investigations and TDR in the grassland are 0.03 and 0.05 cm3/cm3, respectively

Radar Technology

In this book “Radar Technology”, the chapters are divided into four main topic areas: Topic area 1: “Radar Systems” consists of chapters which treat whole radar systems, environment and target functional chain. Topic area 2: “Radar Applications” shows various applications of radar systems, including meteorological radars, ground penetrating radars and glaciology. Topic area 3: “Radar Functional Chain and Signal Processing” describes several aspects of the radar signal processing. From parameter extraction, target detection over tracking and classification technologies. Topic area 4: “Radar Subsystems and Components” consists of design technology of radar subsystem components like antenna design or waveform design