Study about Ionospheric Effects on Spaceborne SAR Azimuth Imaging
电离层对星载合成孔径雷达方位向分辨率影响的分析

In this paper, the effect of some factors such as the size of real antenna, different ionospheric spectra and the size of ionospheric irregularities on the azimuth resolution of Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) is investigated. The results showed that increasing real antenna aperture size but maintaining the equivalent aperture size of the SAR system will decrease the SAR image’s azimuth resolution, however, it can smooth azimuth image; Ionosphere with Kolmogorov spectrum affects the SAR azimuth imaging more seriously than that with two-parameter spectrum; When the irregularity scale is much larger than equivalent aperture size, the impact of the ionosphere on the SAR azimuth resolution can be ignored; However, when irregularity scale is smaller than equivalent aperture size but with close magnitude, the impact of the ionosphere will result in a substantial degradation of the azimuth resolution.