Modeling and Sensing the Vertical Structure of the Atmospheric Path Delay by Microwave Radiometry to Correct SAR Interferograms

The vertical structure of the atmospheric water vapor induces phase errors in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. This paper presents a simulation study to investigate whether spaceborne submillimeter radiometric observations, which can be realized with fairly high spatial resolution, are able to derive the vertical structure of the atmospheric wet delay. The accuracy of the retrieved zenith wet delay (ZWD) trend as a function of surface height is assessed in order to correct the associated height dependence of the interferometric phase error in a SAR interferogram. Using a simulated benchmark, we evaluate the errors associated with the use of both a linear and an exponential model of the behavior of ZWD as a function of the surface height. This paper shows a fairly accurate reconstruction of the trend parameters estimated from radiometer brightness temperature images, with respect to realistic atmospheric profiles provided by radiosounding observations (RAOBs). The trend parameters that we consider in this paper are the slope K for the linear model and scale height H for the exponential one. An overall better accuracy is found for the exponential model, which is more representative of the actual behavior of ZWD with height, resulting in a residual uncertainty in the path delay due to the atmospheric stratification of approximately 0.2-0.3 cm and nearly zero bias, as compared to RAOBs.