Ionosphere correction algorithm for spaceborne SAR imaging

For spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, the dispersive ionosphere has significant effects on the propagation of the low frequency (especially P-band) radar signal. The ionospheric effects can be a significant source of the phase error in the radar signal, which causes a degeneration of the image quality in spaceborne SAR imaging system. The background ionospheric effects on spaceborne SAR through modeling and simulation are analyzed, and the qualitative and quantitative analysis based on the spatio-temporal variability of the ionosphere is given. A novel ionosphere correction algorithm (ICA) is proposed to deal with the ionospheric effects on the low frequency spaceborne SAR radar signal. With the proposed algorithm, the degradation of the image quality caused by the ionosphere is corrected. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.