ATI and GMTI Performance Analysis of Post-Sentinel-1 SAR Systems based on Simulations using OASIS

With the Sentinel-1 expected to be launched at the end of 2013, ESA is already funding activities to study the next generation of C-band SAR instruments. One of the drivers for these developments is the strong user requirement for high resolution and wide swath (HRWS) operations, which can be realized by using Multiple Azimuth Phase centers (MAPS). The current reference system for a post-Sentinel-1 instrument features a 12.8 m long antenna divided along-track in 8 panels which, on receive, are sampled independently. To investigate the final performance in terms of surface current velocity estimation errors, a full multi-channel SAR simulator for open-oceans (OASIS: Ocean ATI-SAR SImulator) has been implemented. This simulator generates multi-channel raw data corresponding to a time-varying simulated ocean surface that includes all main environmental effects, and uses prototypes of the proposed processing algorithms. A detailed performance analysis in terms of final ATI performance is presented in this paper. The GMTI simulations for ocean data were not finished at the time of paper deadline, and thus will be presented at the conference.