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Estimating the Volumetric Soil Water Content of a Vegetable Garden using the Ground Penetrating Radar

Monitoring of soil water content (volumetric water content, VWC) is an important process in agricultural and ecological programs, and a vital process in flood and water resource management. There are several methods in estimating VWC but often these are time consuming, invasive and expensive. This paper investigates the applicability of a surface based geophysical technique, Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR), for estimating the VWC in shallow soil (top 0.30 m of soil subsurface). The guided wave sounding, GWS, technique (an invasive application of the GPR technique) was used on a vegetable garden located at latitude 6.67 and longitude -1.56, south of the College of Engineering, KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana. The MALA ProEx GPR equipment using shielded antennae with a central frequency of 800 MHz was used for the measurements. The result showed that, on the average, the VWC at the top soil (0.065 m) containing humus was high (0.12 m 3 m -3 ) as compared to depth 0.295 m (0.10 m 3 m -3 ). Thus, the topsoil held more water than the soil beneath due to the presence of the organic humus layer. The cabbage planted which had an average root depth of 0.30 m was found to be good for the area. Comparing GWS- derived soil water content data with the gravimetric soil water sampling yielded a root mean square deviation of ±5%. Our research shows that the GWS technique offers a good, reliable, and relatively easy to use geophysical approach for estimation of shallow soil water content