Operational Ionospheric Correction for SAOCOM Interferometry

Abstract:
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are widely used for mapping natural scenarios and continuous terrain deformation monitoring. To facilitate correct mapping, any operational processor should effectively estimate and compensate for spurious effects in the acquisitions. A major source of error, especially for systems operating at lower frequencies, is the ionosphere, which biases the phase of the recorded signal. In this paper, we study the application of an ionosphere correction for the SAOCOM L-band system. In particular, we propose an alternative implementation of the split-spectrum algorithm, ready to ingest already coregistered acquisitions. The entire processing chain was tested on a real stack of SAOCOM acquisitions and cross-validated with Faraday-rotation results.