GPR modeling study in a contaminated area of Krzywa Air Base (Poland)

Abstract

Krzywa Air Base is a former Soviet military base which is highly polluted because of soil contamination during the dismantling of fuel tanks after the 1990 political changes in the U.S.S.R. The contaminated sites are indicated as magazines 1 and 2 in Figure 1. The area is located within the pre‐Sudetic block, where Tertiary and Quaternary deposits lie on Mesozoic crystalline basement. The deposits consist of sands of different grain sizes, gravels, clays, and interbedded silts, with a total thickness ranging from 80 to 100 m. In the extreme cases, the pollution is so intense that the spilled fuel can be extracted in the system of drainage wells. In general, the contamination can be correlated with the geologic structure. As a prelude to acquisition of field data, we simulate and evaluate the expected ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) responses for uncontaminated and contaminated layers.