A Grid Partition Method for Atmospheric Phase Compensation in GB-SAR

Time-series interferograms acquired on a deep pit with a Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GB-SAR) system showed that the atmospheric phase (AP) could be complexly space variant due to rapid changes of the weather conditions and steep topography. Conventional compensation methods that simulate the AP with typical parametrical models are no longer applicable. Based on the theoretical path integral model of the AP, a grid partition (GP) method is proposed. By dividing one interferogram into a certain number of small grids, the refraction variation inside each grid is assumed to be a constant. A system of linear equations is first built based on sufficient permanent scatterers (PSs). Then, bounds and inequality constraints are set to limit the refraction variation of each grid. A constrained linear least-square problem is solved with two-step process to estimate and compensate the AP. To fully validate the feasibility of the GP method, simulated phase interferograms based on four conventional AP models and with the consideration of deformation areas and noise phase are first processed. Then, four experimental interferograms with different types of AP components are processed and made comparisons with the conventional parametrical methods. The quantitative comparisons of the simulated and experimental data sets both proved that the GP method can well reduce the AP errors.