Ultra-wideband ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems are useful for extracting and displaying information for target recognition purposes. The frequency content of projected signals is designed to match the size and type of prospective targets and environments. The soil medium is generally dispersive and, if moist, dissipative as well. Hence, target signatures whether in the time, frequency or joint time-frequency domains, will substantially depend on the target's burial depth, and on the soil's moisture content. To be useful for target recognition purposes the signatures of a given target must be known for several typical burial depths and soil moisture contents. These signatures are then used as templates in the classification process. In an attempt at reducing the number of needed templates, we focus here on the propagation of the pulses in the dissipative soil medium. Disregarding for the moment the scattering interaction with the target, we examine the distortion of the emitted interrogating pulses as they propagate through the soil and are back-scattered to the receiver. We simulated such returned target echoes earlier for several burial depths using a Method-of-Moments code. They all could then be translated to equivalent echoes from the target at some selected standardized depth and soil moisture, and vice-versa. A sufficiently accurate signal processing method for depth conversion could be employed to reduce the number of templates required for the correct classification of subsurface targets with a GPR.