Rogers, Neil and Cannon, Paul (2009) The synthetic aperture radar trans- ionospheric radio propagation simulator (SAR-TIRPS). In: IET 11th International Conference on Ionospheric Radio Systems and Techniques (IRST 2009) :. IET Press, London, pp. 112-116. ISBN 9781849191234
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Space-based synthetic aperture radars (SAR) operating below 1 GHz are subject to forward scattering by ionospheric irregularities. This limits the synthetic aperture and bandwidth over which phase coherence can be maintained. This paper describes the SAR trans-ionospheric radio propagation simulator (SAR-TIRPS), a phase screen model which simulates ionosphere-corrupted SAR images of point targets. The Parabolic Equation propagation method allows both phase and amplitude fluctuations to be modelled. Background Total Electron Content (TEC) is modelled as an additional frequency-dependent phase shift. Examples are presented of L-band and P-band SAR simulations, showing how the target image and derived quantities (sidelobe ratios along- and cross-track) vary with changing ionospheric phase spectrum parameters. SAR-TIRPS proves to be a useful tool in assessing design concepts for low-frequency space radars.