Assessing the performance of Tomographic measurements from a P-Band spaceborne SAR

Abstract:
The candidate Earth Explorer Core Mission BIOMASS is foreseen to be operated in a tomographic phase during approximately the first two months of mission lifetime. During this phase the system will be able to gather multiple acquisitions characterized by small baselines and a repeat pass time in the order of few days, thus allowing tomographic imaging of the vegetation layer. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of ionospheric disturbances, such as Faraday rotations and ionospheric fringes, on the tomographic performance of BIOMASS, with reference to a tomographic processor explicitly designed for a 6 MHz bandwidth system. Results from numerical simulations advocate for the feasibility of providing accurate tomographic measurements.