Distributed Soil Moisture from Crosshole Ground‐Penetrating Radar Travel Times using Stochastic Inversion

In this paper two different subsurface parameterizations are compared for posterior soil moisture estimation from traveltime observations of crosshole GPR. The discrete cosine transform provides the most adequate and efficient results and enables linking MCMC derived parameter uncertainty to model resolution. Geophysical methods offer several key advantages over conventional subsurface measurement approaches, yet their use for hydrologic interpretation is often problematic. We developed the theory and concepts of a novel Bayesian approach for high-resolution soil moisture estimation using travel-time observations from crosshole ground-penetrating radar experiments. The recently developed Multi-Try Differential Evolution Adaptive Metropolis algorithm with sampling from past states, MT-DREAM(ZS), was used to infer, as closely and consistently as possible, the posterior distribution of spatially distributed vadose zone soil moisture and porosity under saturated conditions. Two differing and opposing model parameterization schemes were considered, one involving a classical uniform grid discretization and the other based on a discrete cosine transformation (DCT). We illustrated our approach using two different case studies involving geophysical data from a synthetic water tracer infiltration study and a real-world field study under saturated conditions. Our results demonstrate that the DCT parameterization yields superior Markov chain Monte Carlo convergence rates along with the most accurate estimates of distributed soil moisture for a large range of spatial resolutions. In addition, DCT is admirably suited to investigate and quantify the effects of model truncation errors on the MT-DREAM(ZS) inversion results. For the field example, lateral anisotropy needed to be enforced to derive reliable soil moisture estimates. Our results also demonstrate that the posterior soil moisture uncertainty derived with the proposed Bayesian procedure is significantly larger than its counterpart estimated from classical smoothness-constrained deterministic inversions.

[1]  Klaus Holliger,et al.  Simulated-annealing-based conditional simulation for the local-scale characterization of heterogeneous aquifers , 2009 .

[2]  Takashi Matsumoto,et al.  A Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithm for , 2006 .

[3]  Ling-Yun Chiao,et al.  Multiscale seismic tomography , 2001 .

[4]  B. Jafarpour,et al.  History matching with an ensemble Kalman filter and discrete cosine parameterization , 2008 .

[5]  Thomas Mejer Hansen,et al.  Inferring the Subsurface Structural Covariance Model Using Cross‐Borehole Ground Penetrating Radar Tomography , 2008 .

[6]  T. Hansen,et al.  Monte Carlo full-waveform inversion of crosshole GPR data using multiple-point geostatistical a priori information , 2012 .

[7]  Vivek K. Goyal,et al.  Transform-domain sparsity regularization for inverse problems in geosciences , 2009, GEOPHYSICS.

[8]  Craig Warren,et al.  Creating FDTD models of commercial GPR antennas using Taguchi’s optimisation method , 2011 .

[9]  Roel Snieder,et al.  Model Estimations Biased by Truncated Expansions: Possible Artifacts in Seismic Tomography , 1996, Science.

[10]  F. Day‐Lewis,et al.  Assessing the resolution‐dependent utility of tomograms for geostatistics , 2004 .

[11]  D. Higdon,et al.  Accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation by Differential Evolution with Self-Adaptive Randomized Subspace Sampling , 2009 .

[12]  P. Podvin,et al.  Finite difference computation of traveltimes in very contrasted velocity models: a massively parallel approach and its associated tools , 1991 .

[13]  Henk Keers,et al.  Inverse modeling of unsaturated flow parameters using dynamic geological structure conditioned by GPR tomography , 2008 .

[14]  Andrew Binley,et al.  High‐resolution characterization of vadose zone dynamics using cross‐borehole radar , 2001 .

[15]  David L. Alumbaugh,et al.  Estimating moisture contents in the vadose zone using cross‐borehole ground penetrating radar: A study of accuracy and repeatability , 2002 .

[16]  A. C. Hinnell,et al.  Improved extraction of hydrologic information from geophysical data through coupled hydrogeophysical inversion , 2010 .

[17]  R. Parker,et al.  Occam's inversion; a practical algorithm for generating smooth models from electromagnetic sounding data , 1987 .

[18]  Colin Farquharson,et al.  Constructing piecewise-constant models in multidimensional minimum-structure inversions , 2008 .

[19]  N. Ahmed,et al.  Discrete Cosine Transform , 1996 .

[20]  A. P. Annan,et al.  Electromagnetic determination of soil water content: Measurements in coaxial transmission lines , 1980 .

[21]  Cajo J. F. ter Braak,et al.  A Markov Chain Monte Carlo version of the genetic algorithm Differential Evolution: easy Bayesian computing for real parameter spaces , 2006, Stat. Comput..

[22]  Yoram Rubin,et al.  Mapping permeability in heterogeneous aquifers using hydrologic and seismic data , 1992 .

[23]  David D. Jackson,et al.  Most squares inversion , 1976 .

[24]  Jasper A. Vrugt,et al.  High‐dimensional posterior exploration of hydrologic models using multiple‐try DREAM(ZS) and high‐performance computing , 2012 .

[25]  Michel Aubertin,et al.  Stochastic borehole radar velocity and attenuation tomographies using cokriging and cosimulation , 2007 .

[26]  A. Tarantola,et al.  Linear inverse Gaussian theory and geostatistics , 2006 .

[27]  D. Oldenburg,et al.  Estimating depth of investigation in DC resistivity and IP surveys , 1999 .

[28]  Cajo J. F. ter Braak,et al.  Treatment of input uncertainty in hydrologic modeling: Doing hydrology backward with Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation , 2008 .

[29]  R. Schulin,et al.  Calibration of time domain reflectometry for water content measurement using a composite dielectric approach , 1990 .

[30]  Gregory A. Newman,et al.  Image appraisal for 2-D and 3-D electromagnetic inversion , 2000 .

[31]  Johan Alexander Huisman,et al.  Integrated analysis of waveguide dispersed GPR pulses using deterministic and Bayesian inversion methods , 2012 .

[32]  Kamini Singha,et al.  A framework for inferring field‐scale rock physics relationships through numerical simulation , 2005 .

[33]  D. Rubin,et al.  Inference from Iterative Simulation Using Multiple Sequences , 1992 .

[34]  M. Eppstein,et al.  Efficient three‐dimensional data inversion: Soil characterization and moisture Monitoring from cross‐well ground‐penetrating radar at a Vermont Test Site , 1998 .

[35]  Timothy D. Scheibe,et al.  Lessons Learned from Bacterial Transport Research at the South Oyster Site , 2011, Ground water.

[36]  C. G. Gardner,et al.  High dielectric constant microwave probes for sensing soil moisture , 1974 .

[37]  Albert Tarantola,et al.  Inverse problem theory - and methods for model parameter estimation , 2004 .

[38]  Stefan Finsterle,et al.  Estimation of field‐scale soil hydraulic and dielectric parameters through joint inversion of GPR and hydrological data , 2005 .

[39]  Eric Laloy,et al.  Mass conservative three‐dimensional water tracer distribution from Markov chain Monte Carlo inversion of time‐lapse ground‐penetrating radar data , 2012 .

[40]  Mark A. Wieczorek,et al.  Spatiospectral Concentration on a Sphere , 2004, SIAM Rev..

[41]  A. Green,et al.  Realistic FDTD modelling of borehole georadar antenna radiation: methodolgy and application , 2006 .

[42]  Y. Rubin,et al.  Spatial correlation structure estimation using geophysical and hydrogeological data , 1999 .

[43]  Niklas Linde,et al.  Full-waveform inversion of cross-hole ground-penetrating radar data to characterize a gravel aquifer close to the Thur River, Switzerland , 2010 .

[44]  Behnam Jafarpour,et al.  History matching with an ensemble Kalman filter and discrete cosine parameterization , 2008 .

[45]  A. J. Berkhout Blended acquisition with dispersed source arrays , 2012 .

[46]  Y. Rubin,et al.  Estimating the hydraulic conductivity at the south oyster site from geophysical tomographic data using Bayesian Techniques based on the normal linear regression model , 2001 .

[47]  Stefan Finsterle,et al.  Inversion of tracer test data using tomographic constraints , 2006 .

[48]  Andrew Binley,et al.  Applying petrophysical models to radar travel time and electrical resistivity tomograms: Resolution‐dependent limitations , 2005 .

[49]  M. A. Meju,et al.  Iterative most-squares inversion: application to magnetotelluric data , 1992 .

[50]  Marnik Vanclooster,et al.  Modeling of ground-penetrating Radar for accurate characterization of subsurface electric properties , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[51]  Brian J. Mailloux,et al.  Hydrogeological characterization of the south oyster bacterial transport site using geophysical data , 2001 .

[52]  G. Böhm,et al.  A geostatistical framework for incorporating seismic tomography auxiliary data into hydraulic conductivity estimation , 1998 .

[53]  A. Binley,et al.  Improved hydrogeophysical characterization using joint inversion of cross‐hole electrical resistance and ground‐penetrating radar traveltime data , 2006 .

[54]  S. Hubbard,et al.  Joint inversion of crosshole radar and seismic traveltimes , 2008 .

[55]  Eric Laloy,et al.  Mass conservative three-dimensional water tracer 1 distribution from MCMC inversion of time-lapse 2 GPR data , 2012 .

[56]  Thomas Kalscheuer,et al.  A non-linear truncated SVD variance and resolution analysis of two-dimensional magnetotelluric models , 2007 .

[57]  Jacques R. Ernst,et al.  Application of a new 2D time-domain full-waveform inversion scheme to crosshole radar data , 2007 .