Analysis of computerized ionospheric tomography using PALSAR polarimetric data

The computerized ionospheric tomography (CIT) technique is a means to obtain the spatial distribution of ionospheric electron density from the TEC values, which can be realized by the ground-based GPS. In this paper, by using the ALOS Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) full-pol data and ionospheric data from the IRI 2007, the reconstruction of ionospheric electron density distribution is first proposed. Simulation results show that it can demonstrate the spatial distribution of ionospheric electron density. Compared with GPS measurements, the proposed technique do not needs ground stations and can give a higher resolution results due to the characters of space-borne SAR systems. Thus, it is a promising direction in future CIT.