Really nice writeup! I wish more graduate students would blog about their research in this way. Could be a great way to educate the public and convey the importance of government research funding.<p>I wonder how big the reflection coefficient is for the air/ice interface. It seems like it would be huge. So maybe ground based techniques offer better coupling at the cost of not being able to survey as much area?
On a related note: My father is a geophysicist and he is using ground penetrating radard for archeo prospection. It's really amazing. The software can reconstruct entire ancient cities from the GPR signal.
Thats really pretty amazing. Filtering out the 'echos' would clearly make the data more useful, but I can see how thats almost impossible without very clever engineering