Compensation of Ionospheric Scintillation Impact on Spaceborne SAR Based on Multilayered Phase Screen Model

The spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is affected by ionospheric scintillation, which will lead to the degradation of the imaging quality. Considering the strong spatial variation and random characteristics of scintillation phase error (SPE) along the orbit, a compensation method of ionospheric scintillation effect on spaceborne SAR based on the multilayered phase screen model is proposed in this paper. Multiple reliable Faraday rotation (FR) are obtained by dividing the image into blocks based on fully polarimetric SAR data. The image is compensated using the error phase of multiple phase screens, which is estimated through the overlap between SPEs. Simulating with the ALOS-2 data, we quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method and verify its better compensation performance compared to the traditional schemes.