Performance Analysis of Ionospheric Scintillation Effect on P-Band Sliding Spotlight SAR System

The space-borne P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) maintains excellent penetration capability. However, the low carrier frequency restricts its imaging resolution. The sliding spotlight mode provides an operational solution to meet the requirement of high imaging resolution in P-band SAR design. Unfortunately, the space-borne P-band SAR will be inevitably deteriorated by the ionospheric scintillation. Compared with the stripmap mode, the sliding spotlight SAR will suffer more degradation when operating in the scintillation active regions due to its long integration time and complex imaging geometry. In this paper, both the imaging performance and scintillation effect for P-band sliding spotlight mode are studied. The theoretical analysis of scintillation effect is performed based on a refined model of the two-frequency and two-position coherence function (TFTPCF). A novel scintillation simulator based on the reverse back-projection (ReBP) algorithm is proposed to generate the SAR raw data for sliding spotlight mode. The proposed scintillation simulator can also be applied to predict the scintillation effect for other multi-mode SAR systems such as terrain observation by progressive scans (TOPS) and ScanSAR. Finally, a group of simulations are carried out to validate the theoretical analysis.