Prospects of the FDTD modeling tool gprMax for imaging of ice wedges

Ice wedges are an abundant feature of frozen ground and pose a hazard to any infrastructure near them due to potential thaw subsidence. Several studies have shown that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a suitable geophysical tool to locate the position of these features. Here, we use the finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) modeling tool gprMax to simulate synthetic GPR data across different types of ice wedges. Using these synthetic data sets, we examine the potential of imaging size and geometry of these ice bodies. We demonstrate that for synthetic data, it is possible to perform a classification of ice wedges by simple geometric shapes. A concluding examination of field data and corresponding synthetic data based on a stratigraphic sketch shows the limitations for more complex synthetic and field data.