USGS - science for a changing world

USGS Groundwater Information: Hydrogeophysics Branch

*  Home *  Resources *  Research *  Publications *  About *  Contact Us *  Groundwater Information

ATTENTION:
As part of improvements to the USGS Water Resources Mission Area web presence to better serve you, this site is being sunset.
As some content is migrated to new locations, users will be redirected automatically.
In the interim, these pages are not being updated.
If you have questions, please contact the Hydrogeophysics Branch at hgb_help@usgs.gov

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Internal USGS users should bookmark our new HGB internal home page: https://water.usgs.gov/usgs/espd/hgb/


Offset vertical radar profiling

Alan Witten, School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

John Lane, U.S. Geological survey, Office of Ground Water, Branch of Geophysics, Storrs, CT

Introduction

Microbial digestion of organic contaminants is an in situ means for bio remediation that is currently under development and evaluation. Vegetable oil has been proposed as an agent to stimulate the natural microbial community. This system becomes anaerobic as the vegetable oil is consumed providing the necessary conditions for metabolizing volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In order for this process to be effective in remediating groundwater contamination, the vegetable oil must be introduced into contamination either directly or by creating a "curtain" down gradient.

There are several ways in which such a remediation can fail. One of these is that the vegetable oil stimulant does reach the desired area. As part of a larger program to evaluate the efficacy of the above-cited form of in situ bio remediation, geophysical techniques were employed to remotely characterize the spatial distribution of vegetable oil injected into a shallow unconfined area. The site is a riverfront park on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River and immediately down gradient of known VOC contamination. Approximately 100 m from the river a closely space cluster of wells was developed. Three inline wells were used for vegetable oil injection and approximately 13,700 liters of vegetable/groundwater mix was introduced into these wells over a 3 m screened interval at a depth of approximately 8 m.

As part of this project, downhole radar, cross-well radar tomography and vertical radar profiling (VRP) data sets were acquired for subsequent interpretation and processing. Here, the VRP aspect of the study is presented. In VRP, a receiving antenna is moved vertically in a well for an array of transmitting antenna positions arranged along a line on the ground surface radially outward from the receiver well. Many of the wells in the cluster were used for this purpose in the study. Unlike the more traditional reflection-based radar data, VRP is almost impossible to directly interpret. The are a number ways to reconstruct images of spatial variations in wave speed or attenuation and the one selected for implementation here is diffraction tomography (Devaney, 1984). The following section presents an overview of the diffraction tomography algorithm for VRP, followed by a description of data acquisition, processing steps and the imaging results.


Final copy as submitted to Leading Edge for publication as: Witten, A., and Lane, J.W., Jr., 2003, Offset vertical radar profiling: Leading Edge, v. 22, no. 11, p. 1070-1076.


Download complete article as 175KB PDF.

Note: Download free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view PDF files at the Adobe web site.
Visit http://access.adobe.com for free tools that allow visually impaired users to read PDF files.

USGS Home Water
Climate and Land Use Change Core Science Systems Ecosystems Energy and Minerals Environmental Health Natural Hazards

Accessibility FOIA Privacy Policies and Notices

USA.gov logo U.S. Department of the Interior | U.S. Geological Survey
URL: https://water.usgs.gov/ogw/bgas/publications/2003-LeadingEdge/index.html
Page Contact Information: Contact the Hydrogeophysics Branch
Page Last Modified: Thursday, 29-Dec-2016 20:02:33 EST