Experimental Study of Ionospheric Impacts on Geosynchronous SAR Using GPS Signals

The L-band geosynchronous synthetic aperture radar (GEO SAR) is very susceptible to ionosphere as the significant increases of its integration time and wide swath, leading to image drifts and degradations. This paper demonstrates an experimental study of analyzing ionospheric impacts on GEO SAR, including both background ionosphere and ionospheric scintillation. The experiment consists of two parts. One is the global positioning system (GPS) data recording in which we employ GPS satellites to probe ionosphere and collect the transionosphere GPS signals. Then the recorded signals are used to create the data basis on which simulations are based. The other is the reconstruction of the signal distortions based on the GPS data. Then the two parts are combined to generate the ionosphere-impacted GEO SAR signals. But GEO SAR has very different orbit trajectories from GPS. Thus, in the real operation, the transformation of the temporal-spatial frame between GPS and GEO SAR should be first performed before the focusing and the evaluation are carried out. In cases of current GEO SAR configurations, the background ionosphere will induce image drifts but can be corrected through image registration techniques. The image is also likely to get defocused in azimuth when the second and higher derivatives of total electron content exceed thresholds which are dependent on GEO SAR configurations and the corresponding integration time. Comparatively, scintillations will mainly affect the focusing in azimuth, especially for integrated sidelobe ratios (ISLRs). But scintillations rarely occur over China mainland, and it is suggested to avoid the GEO SAR working during its occurrence.