Helicopter-based GPR survey of Rutor glacier and nearby glaciers, Aosta Valley, Italy, in May 2012

This dataset contains Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) data collected on May 2012, from helicopter, with a 70 Mhz antenna, on the Rutor Glacier (files numbered from 6 to 10), and nearby glaciers situated in Aosta Valley (European Alps). They were collected for ARPA Val d'Aosta, the local environmental protection agency.

The Rutor glacier data and their interpretation, at August 2024, are also being submitted to The Cryosphere scientific journal, in a possible future publication entitled Ground penetrating radar on Rutor temperate glacier supported by ice-thickness modeling algorithms for bedrock detection, by Andrea Vergnano, Diego Franco and Alberto Godio.

The .DZT files are the data files. They can be opened with specialistic geophysical software. In particular, a free and open access package is available, called RGPR and installable in the R environment. (https://cran.r-project.org/) (https://emanuelhuber.github.io/RGPR/). After loading the RGPR library with the R command

library(RGPR)

a file can be read and stored in the "data" variable by the command

data=readGPR("FILE____001.DZT")

The .PLT files are simple text files that contain the geolocation information in standard NMEA format (https://aprs.gids.nl/nmea/#gga).
Each row is a measurement, and there is a measurement every second. To assign the correct geolocation to each GPR trace contained in the .DZT files there are two options:

1) follow your specialistic software manual

2) do it manually by considering that the GPR sample rate of traces is constant in time. The first .PLT line refers to the first GPR trace, and the last .PLT line refers to the last GPR trace.