A New Microwave Imaging System for Dielectric Characterization of Highly Organic Arctic Permafrost Soil

This paper presents a multi-band microwave imaging system that operates at P- and L-bands for the quantitative dielectric reconstruction of organic soil with various saturation levels. Multi-band operation and miniaturization were achieved by introducing slots in the radiating edge of a microstrip patch sandwiched between a substrate and supersaturate layer. The geometry and location of the soil sample container were designed to be in the center of the imaging cavity to simplify the inverse scatting reconstruction algorithm. Preliminary reconstruction of synthetic objects obtained through Born Approximation showed the promising performance of the system to reconstruct a realistic range of dielectric constants of soil samples. The antenna array and the imaging system were fabricated, and preliminary measured results of antenna performance showed good agreement between design and fabrication. This work is of particular interest in physics-based radar retrieval of highly organic arctic soil properties, where the dielectric models of soil are needed in the forward-inverse scattering framework.