In-situ Snowpack Inspection using Bi-static Radar

This paper presents a upward looking bi-static, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument optimized for long-term, non-invasive, remote snowpack monitoring in polar areas. Single-chip radar SoC facilitate a power-efficient implementation potentially operating on battery/solar power. To show the feasibility of detecting and accurately measuring the density and thickness of snow layers a controlled experiment using phantom materials was conducted. The permittivity, which is proportional to the equivalent snow density and the layer thickness was accurately estimated indicating excellent performance using SAR.