Abstract
Allowing near-surface geophysics students to learn ground penetrating
radar (GPR) data processing through hands-on exercises poses a challenge
because of the high cost of professional GPR software. Free processing
and visualization packages are scarce and often either require other
commercial software such as Matab, which many students may not have on
their own computers, or they are limited to specific operating systems.
To allow students to process GPR data on their own computers, for
example data collected as part of a class-based research project or
online available data, the processing software needs to be (1) free, (2)
platform independent, (3) easy to install and use, and should record the
steps the students take to obtain their results in order to facilitate
reproducibility and grading. GPRPy
(https://github.com/NSGeophysics/GPRPy) is an open-source ground
penetrating radar data processing and visualization software that has a
graphical user interface and which is also scriptable. It is
python-based, making it platform independent and independent of
commercial programming environments. The graphical user interface allows
for writing out humanly readable python scripts that can be run from the
command line to automatize the data processing and visualization. GPRPy
is hosted on the collaborative software development website GitHub,
allowing educators and researchers to create and adapt their own
versions to their needs.