Brief Communication: Monitoring active layer dynamic using a lightweight nimble Ground-Penetrating Radar system. A laboratory analog test case

Abstract. Monitoring active layer dynamic is critical for improving the near surface thermal and hydrological process understanding. This study presents the laboratory test of a low-cost Monitoring Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) system within a laboratory experiment of active layer freezing and thawing monitoring. The system is a in-house built low power monostatic GPR antenna coupled with a reflectometer piloted by a single board computer, tested prior to field deployment. The correspondence between the frozen front electromagnetic reflection and temperature allowed the better understanding of the frozen front/bottom of the active layer reflection and the intrinsic permittivity of the frozen layer.