Impacts of ionospheric scintillation on geosynchronous SAR

Geosynchronous Synthetic Aperture Radar (GEO SAR) will be affected by ionosphere scintillation inevitably because it usually works at L band. In this paper, GEO SAR signal model in presence of ionospheric scintillation is proposed. The scintillation sampling model is employed to simulate ionospheric scintillation data. Several GEO SAR imaging simulations in different scintillation cases and a real ionospheric scintillation measurement in Zhuhai district of China are conducted to study the impacts of ionospheric scintillation on GEO SAR in azimuth. The results suggest that ionospheric scintillation will worsen the azimuth resolution, and rise azimuth peak sidelobe ratio (PSLR), and severely deteriorate azimuth integrated sidelobe ratio (ISLR).