Beam-Switch Wide Swath mode for interferometrically compatible products of the post-sentinel HRWS SAR system

The High Resolution Wide Swath (HRWS) system opens up new horizons for spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. In order to best exploit the HRWS capabilities as successor of the current Sentinel-1 mission, a study focused on the HRWS applications was recently founded by the European Space Agency. Within this study, a new operational mode, denoted as Beam-Switch Wide Swath (BSWS), was proposed by the German Aerospace Centre to provide a better answer to specific final user needs. In fact, the BSWS exploits the operational flexibility associated with the HRWS multi-channels architecture and digital beamforming capability to generate single/dual-polarimetric (SP/DP) images, interferometrically compatible with the fully polarimetric ones, while keeping the wide coverage of the SP products. This paper presents the BSWS mode, explains its functional principle and analyses its imaging performance, based on a realistic HRWS reference system.