Effects of Drifting Ionospheric Irregularities for L-Band Geosynchronous SAR Imaging Simulation

The L-band geosynchronous synthetic aperture radar (GEO SAR) is susceptible to the ionospheric irregularities due to its lower carrier frequency, which can be more complicated because the velocity of drifting irregularities is comparable with the scanning velocity of ionospheric penetration points (IPPs) of GEO SAR. In this paper, a drifting ionospheric scintillation simulator (DISS) is proposed for generating L-band GEO SAR data affected by the drifting ionospheric irregularities. The DISS is divided into a static 2D scintillation transfer function generator, a drifting IPP offset indexer and a GEO SAR echo simulator. Based on the DISS, the simulation results indicate that the drifting ionospheric irregularities of the L-band GEO SAR will present different artifacts and more serious decorrelations in L-band GEO SAR images, compared with the L-band low-Earth-orbit (LEO) SAR.