Ionospheric Phase Compensation for InSAR Measurements Based on the Faraday Rotation Inversion Method.

Bing Li,Yuanyuan Ma,Baojun Zhang,Zemin Wang,Jiachun An,Mingci Li,Yide Qian,Hong Geng

doi:10.3390/s20236877

Abstract

The ionospheric error can significantly affect the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals, particularly in the case of L band and lower frequency SAR systems. The ionospheric distortions are mixed with terrain and ground deformation signals, lowering the precision of the interferometric measurements. Moreover, it is often difficult to detect the small-scale ionospheric structure due to its rapid changes and may have more influence on ionospheric phase compensation for InSAR measurements. In this paper, we present a Faraday rotation (FR) inversion method and corresponding procedure to compensate the ionospheric error for SAR interferograms and to detect the variations of small-scale ionospheric disturbances. This method retrieves the absolute total electron content (TEC) based on the FR estimation and corrects the ionospheric error for synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) measurements by transforming the differential TEC into the ionospheric phase. In two selected study cases, located in high latitude and equatorial regions where ionospheric disturbances occur frequently, we test the method using the Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) full-polarimetric SAR images. Our results show that the proposed procedure can effectively compensate the ionospheric phase. In order to validate the results, we present the results of ionospheric phase compensation based on the split-spectrum method as a comparison to the proposed method. To analyze the ability of our proposed method in detecting small-scale ionospheric disturbances, TEC derived from FR estimation are also compared with those derived from the global ionosphere maps (GIM). Our research provides a robust choice for the correction of ionospheric error in SAR interferograms. It also provides a powerful tool to measure small-scale ionospheric structure.

Highlights

Synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) technology has been widely used to measureEarth’s topography and to study geophysical phenomena, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, city subsidence, landslides, and glacier movements [1]
We present a Faraday rotation (FR) inversion method and operational procedure to compensate the ionospheric phase for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferograms
We present a FRininversion method andTwo establish an operational for compensation of ionospheric effects case studies located inprocedure high latitude compensation of ionospheric effects in

Summary

Introduction

Synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) technology has been widely used to measureEarth’s topography and to study geophysical phenomena, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, city subsidence, landslides, and glacier movements [1]. Synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) technology has been widely used to measure. The accuracy of InSAR measurements can be affected by various noise sources, including orbital error, atmospheric error, residual topography error, and decorrelation noise. Sensors 2020, 20, 6877 often neglected before, can significantly affect the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals, in the case of L band and lower frequency SAR systems [2,3,4,5,6]. In SAR interferograms, the ionospheric distortions mixed with the topography and ground deformation phase is usually mistaken for troposphere or orbit error and removed by polynomial fitting with uncertain accuracy. The estimation and compensation of the ionospheric phase are necessary in order to separate the ionospheric phase error from interferograms and improve the InSAR measurement accuracy

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion