1. Mapping the Response of Four Buried Objects in a Sand Dune Using GPR:
Field and Modeling Experiments
Mohammed Al-Bahrani, Ali Al-Mulla, Mohammed Al-Ibrahim, Ali Al-Brahem, Ibrahim Al-Senan
Earth Science Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
Abstract
The objective of this study is to investigate the capability of GPR to detect four buried objects
that have similar dimensions but different EM properties. The four objects were iron, salt water,
wood, and bones. Those objects were selected to evaluate the feasibility of GPR in geotechnical,
hydrogeology, archaeology and forensic applications, respectively. The field work was
conducted using 400 MHz monostatic GPR antenna over sand dune in eastern Saudi Arabia over
a grid size of 18 x 18 m. 2-D lines were acquired at 30 cm cross line separation and those closely
spaced lines were later merged to generate a pseudo 3D volume. The simulated 2-D radargrams
were generated using commercial software and Matlab finite-difference algorithms. The
modeling results provided insights into the GPR responses associated with those four objects as
well as aiding in the interpretation process. The forward modeling corroborated by the field
results reveled that GPR was successful in delineating the four targets with a varying degree of
sensitivity. Furthermore, our field results agree with the forward modeling results in three cases:
iron, salt water and bones. This shows how the GPR method is successfully capable to be utilized
further for several related applications. However, wood had a stronger response in the field
experiment when compared with the forward modeling results, which might be attributed to the
discrepancy between the wood properties used from the literatures for the simulation, and the
actual target’s properties in the experiment. The field data also revealed some interesting
information about the sedimentary architecture of the sand dune and we were able to determine
the strike and dip of the cross beddings in the sand dunes.