A Parametric-Model-Based Approach for Atmospheric Phase Screen Removal in Ground-Based Interferometric SAR

The atmosphere affects the propagation of radar signals by provoking unwanted signal phase changes. In interferometric applications, such as coherent change detection and displacement measurements, this effect may significantly degrade the system performances. Moreover, atmosphere-induced phase changes are both time and space variants, and therefore, they are not easy to be removed. This article proposes a novel method to remove atmospheric effects by using a parametric model of the refractive index, which is derived as an extension of the International Telecommunication Union—Radiocommunication model. The proposed algorithm has been tested on real data acquired by using a ground-based synthetic aperture radar system in conjunction with data collected by a weather station. Data have been acquired continuously for three consecutive days, approximatively every 5 min. Results have shown how the proposed method can effectively remove atmospheric effects and restore the signal phase.