An improved ionospheric scintillation correction method for spaceborne P-band polarimetric SAR

Spaceborne P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) will suffer from ionospheric scintillation, which introduces a random phase into the azimuth signal and leads to image defocusing. For full-polarimetric SAR, it can be corrected by deriving the scintillation phase from Faraday rotation (FR) estimation. When estimating the FR angle, how to preserve changes in scintillation phase while smoothing noise is a key issue. The current method uses a rectangle averaging window. An improved correction method is proposed. Based on the correlation of scintillation phase, a new averaging window for noise suppression is designed to reduce scintillation estimation error. The method does not need any prior information of scintillation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested by simulations based on PALSAR2 data. For a non-homogeneous scene, when turbulence strength CkL = 1034 and CkL = 1035, the proposed method has obvious improvement compared with the current method.