Ultra-wideband radars for measurements over ICE and SNOW

Prof. Richard Moore introduced me to FM-CW radars on my first day at the University of Kansas as a graduate student in 1979 and asked me to put together a radar using laboratory test equipment. I put it together, but it did not provide the results we wanted for detecting buried pipes. This was mainly because of the lack of suitable inexpensive RF and digital technologies at that time. Prof. Moore was a strong advocate for using ultra-wideband FM-CW radars. We are able to implement what he taught me because of recent advances in RF microwave and digital technologies, allowing us to develop the ultra-wideband radars Prof. Moore envisioned for remote sensing of snow and ice. We developed ultra-wideband radars for airborne measurements over ice and snow. One of these radars operates over a frequency range of 150-600 MHz for sounding ice sheets, imaging the ice-bed interface, and mapping internal layers in polar firn and ice; additional radars operate over the frequency ranges of 2-8 and 12-18 GHz for airborne measurements of the thickness of snow over sea ice and land and surface elevation measurements, respectively.