A New Analytical Model to Study the Ionospheric Effects on VHF/UHF Wideband SAR Imaging

With a view to detecting foliage-obscured/ground-obscured targets on a global scale, low frequency (i.e., very high frequency (VHF)/ultrahigh frequency (UHF) band) and wide bandwidth is a trend in future spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system design. However, due to the dispersion of ionosphere, VHF/UHF wide bandwidth SAR signals inevitably experience adverse effects. In contrast to narrow bandwidth SAR at VHF/UHF, quadratic and cubic ionospheric phase errors will introduce noticeable effects on future wide-bandwidth SAR systems. Traditional evaluation models based on Taylor series expansion may become inaccurate when an extremely wide bandwidth is considered. With a focus on this this issue, first, the shortcoming of Taylor series expansion of ionospheric phase errors is briefly discussed in this paper. Then, a new analytical model based on Legendre orthogonal polynomials is developed, which is expected to be widely applicable, especially for low-frequency and wide-bandwidth SAR systems. Finally, compared with previous models based on Taylor series expansion, numerical simulations and evaluations show the superiority of the new model.