Monitoring of Ice Covers by Low Terahertz Frequencies

Under adverse outdoor weather conditions, road surface is often covered by ice or snow, which usually leads to deceasing of friction between automotive tires and road surface. This would degrade transportation efficiency and driving safety seriously. Monitoring of ice or snow covers on road surface becomes necessary and important for reduction of traffic accident rate. In this work, we propose to employ terahertz frequencies to recognize surface conditions (such as roughness and thickness) of a soil road covered by ice. A theoretical model combining surface and volume scattering mechanisms is conducted. Good agreement between the calculation results and measured data confirms the efficiency of low THz frequencies for ice surface monitoring with higher resolution.