Biomass End-to-End PErformance Simulator: Description of the Ionosphere Module

ESA's BIOMASS Earth Explorer mission aims at providing global above ground forest biomass. Its payload is a UHF synthetic aperture radar. At UHF ionospheric effects, notably the group delay and phase advance, the Faraday rotation, and the intensity and phase scintillations (or rapid fluctuations) are significant and have to be properly modelled to be compensated, to understand the limitations of the proposed technique, and to select the optimum observation conditions. This paper summarizes the structure and main characteristics of the ionospheric module of the BIOMASS end-to-end performance simulator (BEEPS-IOM).