Modeling of buried biomass effects on ground penetrating radar

Recent data suggest that the performance of ground penetrating radar (GPR) may be impaired by buried biomass, e.g. tree roots. In this paper, we focus on a model to obtain the scattering characteristics of tree roots, which is the first step in studying the effects of roots on GPR. We begin with the discrete dipole approximation (DDA), an algorithm that can be used to compute fields scattered from dielectric objects of arbitrary shape. Next, the use of the DDA to model scattering from tree roots for the ground-contacting antenna used in experiments is described. Results show that spatial and temporal properties of the simulated data are similar to those of the experiments.