Winter Accumulation Measurements on Alpine Glaciers using Ground Penetrating Radar

We applied two commercial GPR systems for mapping the winter snow accumulation on a longitudinal transect on Rhonegletscher. While one system is a standard setup with one pair of 500 MHz antennas, the second system operates four antennas of 400 MHz in a multi-offset configuration that allows both mapping subsurface structure and determining the snow density. A good agreement between GPR derived accumulation and manual depth probings was found with a RMSE of 0.13 m. Continuous density estimates from the second system where within range of complementary measurements.