Abstract
Abstract. The applications of synthetic aperture radars (SAR) have increased manifold in the past decade, which includes numerous Earth observation applications such as agriculture, forestry, disaster monitoring cryospheric- and atmospheric- studies. Among them, the potential of SAR for ionospheric studies is gaining importance. The susceptibility of SAR to space weather dynamics, and ionosphere in particular, comes at low frequencies of L- and P-bands. This paper discusses one such scintillation event that was observed by L-band Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS)-2 Phased Array L-type SAR (PALSAR) over southern India on March 23, 2015. The sensors also acquired data sets on four other days on which the ionosphere was quiet. Ionospheric parameter measurements of total electron content (TEC) and amplitude scintillation (S4) index from ground-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver at Tirunelveli was used to establish the ionospheric conditions on the days of SAR acquisition as well as to corroborate the S4 estimated from SAR. Multi-temporal ALOS-2 data sets were utilized to calculate S4 from two separate methods and the results have a good agreement with GNSS receiver measurements. This highlights the potential of SAR as an alternate technique of monitoring ionospheric scintillations that can be utilized as complementary to the highly accurate and dedicated measurements from the GNSS networks.
Highlights
With the advent of spaceborne remote sensing, the spectrum of techniques for Earth observation has broadened
Five polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data sets acquired by Advanced Land Observation Satellite-2/Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS-2/Phased Array L-type SAR (PALSAR)-2) have been used in this study
This paper demonstrates the capability of low frequency SAR for observation and quantification of ionospheric scintillations
Summary
With the advent of spaceborne remote sensing, the spectrum of techniques for Earth observation has broadened. Adding to the list is synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The several advantages of SAR over other remote sensing techniques, such as all-weatherand day-night capability, penetration through the clouds, etc., makes it suitable for various applications. Agriculture, forestry, disaster monitoring, oceanic-, cryospheric- and atmosphericstudies are a few applications that are being widely implemented using SAR. The susceptibility of SAR to space weather dynamics comes from its interaction with the charged layer of free electrons, the ionosphere. SAR sensors operating at low frequency bands of L-band (~1.27 GHz) and P-band (~450 MHz) are vulnerable to this charged layer in the atmosphere
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