Combined Estimation of Ionospheric Effects in SAR Images Exploiting Faraday Rotation and Autofocus

Abstract

At lower frequencies, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images can be significantly affected by ionospheric scintillations. This letter proposes an approach to estimate ionospheric artifacts in single SAR images by combining Faraday rotation (FR) estimates and autofocus methods by using a Wiener filter. This novel approach achieves superior performance compared to using these techniques independently. This improvement is demonstrated by injecting randomly simulated ionospheric phase screens into simulated point targets and airborne data adjusted to the parameters of the Biomass system.