GPR wave field decomposition, synthesis and imaging for lossless layered vertically transverse isotropic media

In this paper a scheme is presented to process 3D ground-penetrating radar reflection data acquired on a surface above a vertical transverse isotropic layered medium. The processing steps first decompose the data into Transverse Electric and Transverse Magnetic modes and up and down going waves, where the two modes are fully separated and can be treated separately in the two following steps. The first step that follows is wave field synthesis, where a virtual receiver is constructed in the layered subsurface at any depth level, from which is virtual vertical radar profile can be constructed. This can be done down to the depth level where the waves generated from the upper half space can reach as propagating waves. Once the up and down going vertical radar profiles are obtained at this virtual receiver position, well-known interferometry by deconvolution is used as a second step to obtain an image containing local primary reflection coefficients as a function of incidence angle of the initial plane wave. A numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of removing multiples from the data and constructing an image free of effects of such internal multiple reflections.