Ground-Based Ultra Wideband Dual-Polarized Radar Sounding of Greenland Ice Sheets

Ice sounding and mapping internal layers with radars over large areas is an effective way to obtain data to understand and model ice dynamics. To map the bottom most layers and determine the ice-bed topography of more than 3-km Greenland ice with fine resolution, we developed a 180 - 340 MHz ultrawide band (UWB) dual-polarized ice sounding radar. The radar was deployed as a part of the East Greenland Ice-core Project (EGRIP) in summer 2019. It is configured as a 12-channel multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system. We designed and built a dual-polarized tightly coupled antenna-array. This paper presents the radar design, antenna performance and sample results from the data collected in the field.