SAR Imaging Degradation by Ionospheric Irregularities Based on TFTPCF Analysis

The effects of ionospheric irregularities on spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signal propagation with double path and multilook angle are studied in a model in which a two-frequency and two-position coherence function (TFTPCF) has been adopted for analysis. The TFTPCF is derived from the phase-screen principle. The ambiguity function based on TFTPCF has been used to analyze the effects of ionospheric turbulence on range resolution and cross resolution. The results show that, in some cases, the effects from the irregularities on SAR imaging can be very serious