Simulation and compensation of ionospheric phase scintillation noise in spotlight SAR data

This thesis addresses the problem of refocusing smeared SAR images caused by ionosphere phase scintillation noise. A SAR data is smeared when the received signal experiences phase irregularities due to platform orbit deviation, target movement, or, in this thesis, ionospheric scintillation noise due to trans-ionosphere propagation is analyzed.;This thesis proposes a two-dimensional polynomial phase fitting algorithm to compensate scintillation noise. This work discusses some requirements of the scene in order to carry out the compensation and what is gained and lost in the process. A successful application of the proposed algorithm to TerraSAR-X data is also presented.;A SAR simulator is constructed to generate stripmap and spotlight data that satisfy theoretically predicted performances under ideal conditions. The simulator is incorporated with ionospheric phase scintillation models to analyze the broadening effect on system's PSF. Degraded simulation spotlight data are used to test the proposed compensation algorithm.