Full-polarimetric GPR for detecting ice fractures

The real-time monitoring of ice fracture width and direction is of great significance for the safety of Antarctic scientific expedition and the understanding of the process of ice fracture induced by avalanches. Using full-polarimetric ground penetrating radar (GPR) system to detect ice cracks, the scattering matrix is obtained and processed by polarization decomposition. Compared with the traditional pulse radar, more comprehensive and more intuitive information of ice cracks can be obtained. By using the Pauli decomposition method in polarization decomposition, the forward data obtained by the three-dimensional finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is processed, and the applicability of the proposed decomposition method is proved. For testing the feasibility, we performed numerical and laboratory experiments and applied the Pauli decomposition to the GPR data for ice fracture characterization. On this basis, the method is used to imaging small scale ice cracks on the lake surface, and good results are achieved, which paves the way for further practical application.