Measurement and mitigation of the ionosphere in L-band Interferometric SAR data

Satellite-based repeat-pass Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) provides a synoptic high spatial resolution perspective of Earth's changing surface, permitting one to view large areas quickly and efficiently. By measuring relative phase change from one observation to the next on a pixel-by-pixel basis, maps of deformation and change can be derived. Variability of the atmosphere and the ionosphere leads to phase/time delays that are present in the data that can mask many of the subtle deformation signatures of interest, so methods for mitigation of these effects are important. Many of these effects have been observed in existing ALOS PALSAR data, and studies are underway to characterize and mitigate the ionosphere using these data. Since the ionosphere is a dispersive medium, it is possible in principle distinguish the ionospheric signatures from the non-dispersive effects of deformation and the atmosphere. In this paper, we describe a method for mapping the ionosphere in InSAR data based on a multi-frequency split-spectrum processing technique. We examine a number of PALSAR data sets, including fully polarimetric and single-polarization 28 MHz bandwidth data, where anomalous effects in phase, amplitude and image registration have been observed. We demonstrate the estimation of the ionosphere by means of the split spectrum technique for estimating differential TEC, whereby a radar waveform is transmitted over the full PALSAR spectral band and widely separated portions of the receive spectrum are processed independently and compared for dispersive effects, and quantify its performance.