A New Centroid Frequency-Based Algorithm to Estimate the Attenuation of Ground Penetrating Radar

Summary Amplitude of electromagnetic (EM) waves is attenuated when propagating in a lossy medium. The attenuation which is commonly characterized by the loss tangent depends on the electromagnetic properties of the composing materials, medium structure and the nominal operating frequency of the transmitted signal. Therefore, evaluating the EM waves attenuation can give insights to the material’s constitutive parameters. Assuming a Ricker wavelet as the source wavelet, a nonlinear equation relating the frequency to two-way travel time, loss tangent and nominal frequency is derived that is then solved by probabilistic approach inversion to recover the sought model parameters. The proposed approach is applied into a real dataset acquired on Mount Etna volcano, Italy.