Comparison of Measured Ground Penetrating Radar Response of Soil Surface to FDTD Model

When using non-ground coupled Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect buried objects, one major source of clutter is the surface of the ground. This is especially true if the surface of the ground is not very flat. Responses from the surface will show up below the main response from the ground and mix with the responses of buried objects. To better understand this response and potentially remove it I investigated measuring the soil surface profile with a LIDAR and then modeling the GPR response using the FDTD code gprMax. The modeled response was then subtracted from the measured GPR data.