Glacier Monitoring with Dual-Receiver Radar Architecture: Preliminary Experimental Results

Glaciers are nowadays becoming a more and more important topic to investigate, due to their close relationship with the climate change and impact on people living in mountainous areas. For this reason, the researches on new, faster, non-destructive and valuable techniques to monitor such natural bodies became necessary. In this framework, an already-existed radar dual-receiver architecture, used in recent years for snowpack monitoring, has been tailored to be used for the first time for glacier monitoring. After some improvements of the system, the radar architecture was tested in the Italian Alps, more precisely at the Cherillon glacier (Valle d'Aosta). The preliminary results show a good agreement with the traces collected by a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) in 2019 for what concerns glacier depth, when a speed for the wave in the ice is assumed. However, the dual-receiver architecture demonstrated that it was capable of estimating independently not only the glacier depth, but also the wave speed, opening in addition the analysis to further possibilities.