ABSTRACT

Considering the increased popularity for backcountry mountain recreation activities, potentially problematic snowpack interfaces are currently of great interest given their impact on snow stability. The identification of interface vertical locations and spatial variability in the snowpack is essential for avalanche danger forecasting. The Gaspé Peninsula specific climate often leads to a complex snowpack development, where the need of improved monitoring is important. The goal of this research is to assess an automated method to detect contrasted snow interfaces using a 24 GHz Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) portable radar. Based on different in-situ configurations, we compared the radar amplitude signals with in-situ snow geophysical measurements, including SnowMicroPenetrometer (SMP). Radar measurements have been done following two different protocols: (1) mobile radar looking-up and down in order to understand the radar-snow wave interactions and optimize its parameters for spatial variability assessment of contrasted snow layers and (2) fixed radar looking-up to evaluate its potential in monitoring snow stratigraphy temporal variability. Results show good agreements with compared validation data with 80% of manually identified interfaces detection and a vertical positioning error of 3 cm. The presented FMCW radar appears to have a good potential for spatial and temporal variability assessment of snowpack stratigraphy.

摘要

考虑到野外山地休闲活动的日益普及，考虑到它们对积雪稳定性的影响，可能存在问题的积雪界面目前引起了人们的极大兴趣。识别积雪中的界面垂直位置和空间变异性对于雪崩危险预测至关重要。加斯佩半岛的特定气候通常会导致复杂的积雪发展，因此需要改进监测非常重要。本研究的目的是评估一种使用 24 GHz 调频连续波 (FMCW) 便携式雷达检测对比雪界面的自动化方法。基于不同的原位配置，我们将雷达幅度信号与原位进行了比较雪地球物理测量，包括 SnowMicroPenetrometer (SMP)。雷达测量遵循两种不同的协议：(1) 移动雷达向上和向下查找，以了解雷达-雪波相互作用并优化其参数以评估对比雪层的空间变异性和 (2) 固定雷达查找-评估其在监测雪地层时间变化方面的潜力。结果表明，与比较验证数据具有良好的一致性，其中 80% 的手动识别界面检测和 3 厘米的垂直定位误差。所提出的 FMCW 雷达似乎对积雪地层的空间和时间变异性评估具有很好的潜力。