Validation of ground penetrating radar full-waveform inversion for field scale soil moisture mapping

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is an efficient method for soil moisture mapping at the field scale, bridging the scale gap between small-scale invasive sensors and large-scale remote sensing instruments. Nevertheless, commonly-used GPR approaches for soil moisture characterization suffer from several limitations and the determination of the uncertainties in GPR soil moisture sensing has been poorly addressed. Herein, we used an advanced proximal GPR method based on full-waveform inversion of ultra-wideband radar data for mapping soil moisture and uncertainties in the soil moisture maps were evaluated by three different methods. First, GPRderived soil moisture uncertainties were computed from the GPR data inversion, according to measurements and modeling errors and to the sensitivity of the electromagnetic model to soil moisture. Second, the reproducibility of the soil moisture mapping was evaluated. Third, GPR-derived soil moisture was compared with ground-truth measurements (soil core sampling). The proposed GPR method appeared to be highly precise and accurate, with spatially averaged GPR inversion uncertainty of 0.0039 m3m−3, a repetition uncertainty of 0.0169 m3m−3 and an uncertainty of 0.0233 m3m−3 when compared with ground-truth measurements. These uncertainties were mapped and appeared to be related to some local model inadequacies and to small-scale variability of soil moisture. In a soil moisture mapping framework, the interpolation was found to be the determinant source of the observed uncertainties. The proposed GPR method was proven to be largely reliable in terms of accuracy and precision and appeared to be highly efficient for soil moisture ∗[email protected] mapping at the field scale.