Effects of Ionosphere Polarimetric Dispersion on Lower-Frequency Spaceborne SAR

Abstract

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, especially operating at lower-frequency, such as L-band and P-band, are significantly affected by ionosphere effects, therein, Faraday Rotation (FR) is the rotation of the polarization plane of the radar signal and reduces the accuracy of the polarization scattering matrix. Models of FR effects have already been proposed, but most of which ignore the polarimetric dispersion (PD) caused by FR for its high disturbance over the range bandwidth. A novel model of PD based on frequency domain range pulse compression is proposed in this paper, and simulation results show that PD has little effect on L-band systems and P-band-narrower-bandwidth SAR systems, but will introduce some serious effects on P-band-wider-bandwidth SAR systems.