Uncertainty in ground penetrating radar models

Uncertainty seems an ignored aspect of everyday life of a geophysicist who uses ground penetrating radar and analyses the data beyond direct interpretation methods. Several causes of uncertainty are discussed that can be classified as belonging to uncertainties in the connection of electromagnetic parameters to desired physical parameters of different application domains, or belonging to uncertainties in the input. The input is either the system transmitter, receiver combination and the antennas, or an incident field. Given the state of the community´s ability to model three-dimensional data in complicated subsurface configurations and to estimate electromagnetic parameters or other desired parameters using these models in inverse modeling of measured data, it is advocated that these uncertainties are being considered in the modeling efforts to understand how they propagate through the model into the measured data, and in turn how they affect the parameter estimation results.