Simulation of ionospheric effects on L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar images

A procedure to simulate the effects of the ionosphere on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is presented. The propagation delay errors induced by the ionosphere have to be compensated to millimeter level in order to meet the scientific requirements for an L-band mission dedicated to deformation measurements, which are summarized in [1]. The simulator presented in this paper can be used to study the effects of an arbitrary ionospheric state on SAR images and to generate disrupted raw and focused images starting from ionospherefree real SAR images and use them to validate ionosphere estimation methods.