Performance Analysis of Phase Gradient Autofocus for Compensating Ionospheric Phase Scintillation in BIOMASS P-Band SAR Data

The P-band synthetic aperture radar of the European Space Agency BIOMASS mission will be affected by ionospheric phase scintillation at high latitudes, which introduces a random high-order azimuth phase error. The dependence of the performance of the phase gradient autofocus (PGA) algorithm for scintillation compensation on the strength of ionospheric turbulence and the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) is analyzed. In order to keep resolution degradation below 2%, the SCR must exceed 16 and 20 dB for turbulence strengths C_kL = 10³³ and 10³⁴, respectively. For large values of C_kL, phase scintillation adds significantly to post-PGA degradation in the integrated and peak sidelobe ratios. Simulations based on scenes derived from PALSAR data demonstrate the effectiveness of PGA.