Geosynchronous SAR raw data simulator in presence of ionospheric scintillation using reverse backprojection

Abstract

The future L-band geosynchronous synthetic aperture radar (GEO SAR) system will be inevitably affected by ionospheric scintillation. Due to the lack of the real system, it is necessary to achieve the scintillation-affected GEO SAR raw data for the research of influential mechanism and correction strategies. A method for the generation of scintillation-affected GEO SAR raw data is proposed that utilises the reverse backprojection (ReBP) to efficiently and accurately modulate the scintillation transfer function on GEO SAR signals. A simulation experiment for a real SAR scene from one of the ALOS-PALSAR observation is operated in case of the current inclined L-band GEO SAR system configuration. The simulation takes less time by using the ReBP, compared with the existent method, and shows the speckle-like phase error similar to the injected scintillation phase error, which validates the nice efficiency and accuracy of the proposed methodology.