Abunada, Abdulrahman , Pierce, Iestyn , Khattab, Tamer , Zorba, Nizar , Heggy, Essam
2024-01-01 null null null(卷), null(期), (null页)
High groundwater is the main natural strategic reserve of fresh water for several hyper-arid nations in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. The characterization of the extent, volume, and properties of this groundwater in large aquifer systems primarily relies on sporadic and unmonitored well logs. This, in tum, results in inaccurate groundwater maps in several areas, which compromise effective water management during droughts. It is therefore crucial to have the capability to map shallow aquifers on a large scale with metric resolution that allows a more comprehensive assessment of groundwater resources and dynamic. This research is part of the DesertSEA experiment, a national project in which Qatar is partnering with several US universities and NASA to conceptualize a VHF airborne sounding radar, named Desert Subsurface Exploration of Aquifers (DESERT- SEA), capable of probing shallow aquifers in the first 30 to 50 meters of desiccated grounds. The successful operation of DESERT-SEA requires an accurate assessment of the VHF interference in hyper-arid and low-lying areas, which can compromise the ability to detect shallow aquifers. As such, we build an Interference sensing model (ISM) in the frequency band from 10 to 300 MHz. This frequency covers the two bands operated by Desert-SEA; the first is centered around e40 MHZ and the second at 200 MHz. Herein, we show the results of ISM for the second band based on VHF background noise measured in five locations, which have been identified based on their promising potential for mapping shallow aquifers.