Staggered SAR Simulation of the Sea Surface and Moving Ships

To achieve High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) imaging, operated with variable Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF), staggered SAR will be applied to the next-generation spaceborne SAR system. Variable PRF will lead to non-uniform azimuth sampling. To demonstrate the effects of non-uniform sampling on the sea surface and moving targets imaging, a frequency-domain simulator is proposed in this paper. First, the echoes in staggered mode with nonuniform sampling in azimuth are generated by the frequency domain simulator. Then, the raw signal is reconstructed and resampled by the Best Linear Unbiased (BLU) interpolation, and focused by SAR imaging methods. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the simulation process.