Analysis of Performance in the Retrieval of 2-D Ionospheric Irregularity Maps in the Biomass Mission

Abstract

Low-frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are affected by the impact the ionospheric propagation on the radar waves. 2-D maps can be obtained as product of the ionospheric corrections allowing for imaging of ionospheric irregularities at very high resolution or broader coverage when compared to other sensing technologies (e.g., GNSS, ionosondes, etc). We analyze in this paper the case of Biomass and characterize the errors in the imaging of the ionosphere resulting from the calibration algorithms foreseen for its Ground Prototype Processor, a Faraday rotation based and an autofocus approach. The methodology of the analysis relies on a turbulent power law Rino model for the perturbations of the ionosphere and the consideration of the spectral behavior of the algorithms. The final estimates provide imaging with sub-kilometric resolutions and relative errors between 10 and 50% for the analyzed cases and algorithms. reconstructing the phase screen from the data