Polar Ionosphere Irregularity Structure and Dynamics by means of X-band Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

The ionosphere effects on microwave propagation and degrades the image quality of space-borne SAR acquisitions. Despite of its reduced effect at high frequencies, phase distortions on the interferograms are often visible on X-band TSX/TDX data. In this paper, the ionospheric phase distortions associated with the small-scale irregularities in TSX/TDX pursuit mode interferograms are analysed. A coincident strong ionospheric drift in the along-track direction is observed by the ground-based HF frequency measurements of SuperDARN. The ionospheric phases are separated from the topographic contributions by using parallax, and the ionospheric altitudes are estimated from the SAR data and cross-validated against SuperDARN data.