Radar sounding of glaciers in Greenland

The authors have developed a coherent radar depth sounder operating at 150 MHz. The system is designed to operate as an unfocused SAR and obtains the sensitivity required to sound glacial ice through signal processing even though peak transmit power is about 200 W. The author installed this system on a NASA P-3 aircraft and collected radar data on several flights over Greenland glaciers during the summer of 1995. The radar data were collected in conjunction with laser elevation measurements performed by NASA Wallops and are tagged with Global Positioning System (GPS) information. They collected data over the Humboldt, Jacobshavn and Petermann glaciers. To the best of their knowledge the radar data over these glaciers are the first ever obtained. They applied a homomorphic deconvolution technique to remove multiple echoes of surface and ice-bottom interface. They have been able to identify the grounding line from the radar data. They provide a brief system description and experimental results along with geophysical interpretation of radar data. They also discuss the theory and present results of the homomorphic deconvolution procedure.