Compensation for the ionospheric dispersion effect on spaceborne P-band full-polarimetric wideband SAR

Spaceborne P-band full-polarimetric wideband synthetic aperture radar (SAR) will be affected by ionospheric phase dispersion and polarimetric dispersion. An improved contrast optimization autofocus (COA) method using four polarization channel data is proposed to compensate for both phase dispersion and polarimetric dispersion. The basis and steps of the method are given. Its performance is analysed by typical target simulation under clutter background and compared with traditional COA method for single channel. The residual quadratic phase error (QPE) of single channel compensated by traditional method may exceed 45 degrees focusing threshold, while the proposed method can reduce the error to less than 10 degrees. Due to the lack of spaceborne P-band SAR data, we simulate the effect of ionosphere on P-band SAR based on ALOS2 PALSAR2 data and verify the proposed method. The simulation result shows the proposed method is effective and superior to traditional method.

Automated summary

This paper proposes an improved autofocus method using four polarization channel data to compensate for phase dispersion and polarimetric dispersion in spaceborne P-band full-polarimetric wideband synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Simulation results show that the proposed method is effective and superior to traditional methods.