However, the development and acceptance of GPR as a soil water content sensor is still limited by the cumbersomeness of its application in field conditions, due to the complexity of data acquisition and processing. Conversely, given the large contrast between Оµ of water (81) and that of air (1) and of commonly occurring solid components (5вЂ“12), it is often assumed that variation in Оµ is primarily due to variation in water content. A review of the numerous laboratory studies, as provided in Knight, shows that the dominant factors controlling Оµ of a material are: (1) the volume fractions and dielectric constants of the individual components (2) the geometrical arrangement or distribution of the components and (3) the physical and/or chemical interactions between components. These pulses propagate through low-loss materials until they are reflected or diffracted by interfaces and objects that exhibit contrasts in the electric permittivity (Оµ). A GPR system consists of an arrangement of antennas that can emit and receive electromagnetic pulses in the radar frequency range of 1 MHz to a few GHz. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is one of the geophysical techniques, currently used in agricultural research and application to monitor shallow soil water content. In agriculture, the use of these methods was largely motivated by the need for reliable, quick and easy measurements of soil parameters at field and landscape spatial extents. Geophysical methods provide a low cost and noninvasive way of gathering a large amount of information on various physical soil properties. , with the aim to identify several emerging methods and technologies from geophysics. Reviews of soil moisture measurement techniques are given by Robinson et al.

A great deal of research has gone into the development of novel SWC techniques capable of providing measurement of a physical variable that is a surrogate for SWC across a wide range of spatial scales. The assessment of soil water content (SWC) variation on both spatial and temporal scales is fundamental in many research areas and applications, such as land use planning, irrigation management, ecological and hydrological modelling. The results highlight the critical importance of the antenna frequency and of the spatial scale of soil/subsoil processes being investigated. It was also evident that the noise tended to decrease with the complexity of processing, then the most error-effective procedure was selected. The results showed that the type and range of spatial structures of GPR data did not depend on data processing at a given frequency. Six data processing sequences with an increasing level of complexity were applied. The objectives were: (1) to investigate the impact of data processing on radar signals (2) to select a quick, efficient and error-effective data processing for detecting subsurface features (3) to examine the response of GPR as a function of operating frequency, by using statistical and geostatistical techniques.

The data were collected with 250, 6 MHz antennas in a gravelly soil located in south-eastern Italy. In this paper, a quantitative analysis of GPR data is proposed. However, the wide use of GPR is greatly limited by the data processing complexity. Over the last few years high-resolution geophysical techniques, in particular ground-penetrating radar (GPR), have been used in agricultural applications for assessing soil water content variation in a non-invasive way.

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