A Dual-Beam Interferometric Simulator for Wavemill Instrument Assessment

In the framework of the studies on the Wavemill concept, an End-to-End simulator has been developed in order to asses the different configurations and related sensitivity of a wide-swath interferometric SAR instrument. The simulator, being developed by Starlab under ESA contract, integrates all simulation, processing, and inversion steps involved in a real acquisition. This includes the acquisition geometry, the sea state (including swell), the sea surface scattering, the atmospheric attenuation, and the instrument configuration (including monostatic and bistatic channels). In addition, the simulator provides a SAR processing suit and a sea surface movement retrieval module. All in all, four main output products are provided: raw data (RAW), single look complex data (SLC), precision image (PRI), and sea surface movement vectors (SMV).