On the Influence of the Atmosphere on Wideband

Space-borne SAR Signal Propagation and Imaging

Andreas Danklmayer
Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques
Wachtberg, Germany
Andreas.Danklmayer@fhr.fraunhofer.de

Abstract— In this contribution the role of the atmosphere on communication and navigation for an initial assessment. The
space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems is revisited presented results are relevant in the context of future space-
in some detail and reviewed together with a first step towards a
quantitative assessment of the effects of the atmosphere on the
borne SAR system design and possible strategies for
wideband signals phase.
correction- and mitigation algorithms.
Index Terms—Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging,
wideband, ionospheric propagation effects, tropospheric II. TROPOSPHERIC EFFECTS
propagation effects, phase delay, attenuation The nature of tropospheric effects can be basically split-up
into two components. The first one refers to attenuation due to
I. INTRODUCTION atmospheric constituents, i.e. gases, water particles,
hydrometeors, in general termed precipitation which is most
As an evolutionary development the bandwidth of future
severe for higher frequency bands (X-band and beyond).
space-borne synthetic-aperture radar systems for day-and-
Because attenuation due to rain and other precipitation is only
night-all-weather imaging is going to increase considerably.
present during a limited percentage of time, such effects are
For the knowledgeable reader this comes as no real surprise
often considered as inevitable and acceptable in many cases.
since an increased bandwidth of the transmitted signals results
Since rain is temporally limited, a second acquisition could be
in an improved range resolution, įr, according to
scheduled if time constraints are uncritical. In the present
contribution all attenuation effects are left aside but the
(1)
interested reader may find an assessment and more details
about various effects in [1].
where c is the speed of light and Br the bandwidth of the
The second component refers to delay effects which may
range chirp, respectively.
play a major role when tropospheric effects are considered.
However, up to approximately 30 GHz they exhibit a non-
As a result, the improved resolution will enable the retrieval dispersive behaviour, thus the difference in the case of even
of fine-structural features currently not achievable from space. wideband signals below this limit is the same across the entire
However, before such systems will be implemented, the effects bandwidth. As well known, the delay in the troposphere
of the atmosphere on the traversing signals have to be revisited. consists of a hydrostatic and a wet part together with a liquid
Various propagation effects for carrier frequencies such as in part according to the following equation.
the P-,L-,C-,X-, and Ka-band have been assessed and
investigated in the past [1-8]. The number of publications about
(2)
the influence of the atmosphere on wideband SAR signals
seems to be presently limited [9] in the classical SAR
Where ¨dtropo is the total delay that occurs in the
literature. There are few examples of airborne SAR systems
troposphere, ddry is the dry delay, dwet corresponds to the wet
showing ultra-high resolution with high relative bandwidth of
delay and dliq denotes the liquid delay. The most important
up to 40% [10, 11] in the case of X-band. In this contribution
contribution in absolute quantities is due to the dry, i.e.
we strive to extent the analysis of atmospheric effects in the
hydrostatic part, which is in the order of 2.3 m one-way in
airborne to the space-borne case which requires additional
zenith direction. For the wet delay the values are lower
fundamental study. The differences of the propagation path
however are more variable and cannot be modelled as precise
between airborne and space-borne SAR systems are obvious,
as the dry delay. Maximum values can reach up to 40 cm in
i.e. the signals in the space-borne case have to traverse the
one-way zenith direction and are correlated with the presence
entire troposphere as well as a large part of the ionosphere,
of water vapour. Relatively small contributions can be found
while the propagation path in the airborne is limited to
due to the liquid delay, in general less than 3 cm due to heavy
troposphere. SAR systems with higher bandwidth that can be
rain (at 100 mm/h rain-rate). Furthermore, if the delay due the
used for validation and verification of various effects are
liquid constituents becomes remarkable, the imaged scene
presently not in operation and therefore our strategy is to take
would not be useful anyway because of heavy attenuation.
resource to well-established channel models applied in
Thus in summary the liquid delay is safely neglected.

978-1-4673-7297-8/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE 470
 Since the length of the propagation path through the
troposphere determines the total delay, the height of the scene
has to be included in any case, if the delay needs to be
modelled accurately.
Current tropospheric models like those applied for
navigation systems could assist in deriving the delay without
taking resource to real-time services, i.e. are operating in a
blind mode [12].
III. IONOSPHERIC EFFECTS
The ionosphere plays a major role for SAR systems
operating at L-band and below, due to different ionospheric
effects like scintillations, which is basically a rapidly changing
behaviour on phase and amplitude. Further effects to be
mentioned are refraction, attenuation, Faraday rotation etc.
Among the effects which are most severe for typical incidence
angles found in the SAR domain at X-band and wideband
signals are the delays due to the dispersive nature of the
ionosphere. The most important parameter that characterises
the ionosphere is the total electron content (TEC) which is
given in 10^16 electrons/m^2. Typical values are 5 TECU but
depending on several parameters, i.e. the 11 year sun cycle, the
time of the day, the time of the year, the geographical location
on Earth, values can reach up to 100 TECU in certain cases.
Depending on the geographical location on Earth, pole and
equatorial regions exhibit different characteristics than mid-
latitude which are in general less affected. Basically, the
dispersive nature of the ionosphere causes different delays for
different frequencies, i.e. higher frequencies are less delayed
than lower frequencies. In the case of the global positioning
System (GPS) such delay differences are beneficially exploited
to correct for delay influences and furthermore to derive the
characteristics of the Ionosphere in terms of the amount of free
electrons. In a further step, global ionospheric maps (GIMs) are
provided based on an international network of receiver stations
[14].
In the case of SAR the governing equation for the
ionospheric delay in zenith direction can be given as
(3)
where K is a constant with the value of 40.28 m^3/s^2, f
denotes the frequency and TEC represents the Total electron
content as specified above. For typical incidence angles in a
SAR scenario (non-grazing) the mapping function, i.e. the
calculation of the slant-range delay based on the zenith delay
can be performed with sufficient accuracy by applying a
cosine-law. However low elevation geometries require a more
sophisticated approach and various mapping functions have
been devised for such configurations.
Figure 1 and Figure 2 are two plots for comparison of the
two-way delay for a system currently in use with a bandwidth
of 300 MHz (Figure 1) and an hypothetical system across a
bandwidth of 40% in the X-band case (Figure 2) for different
incidence angles starting from a nadir looking geometry up to
70° incidence angle. The differences across the bandwidth
2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR)
become obvious. The value of 5 TECU has been chosen since
this is a reasonable quantity for the residual error that could
remain if a deterministic correction based on external service
data is applied.
For previous systems like TerraSAR-X with a bandwidth of
150 MHz or 300 MHz the differences across the bandwidth are
not pronounced, but for the considered wideband frequencies,
this contribution cannot be ignored in order to properly focus a
SAR image and to get proper geolocation.
In a first approach the correction can be performed by
taking resource to external services which provide the TEC
values with a reasonable temporal and spatial resolution,
depending on the service. Typical temporal resolutions are 2 h
down to 15 min. depending on the processing time and the
update rates. The remaining uncertainty is related to the
remaining errors in the products which are also connected to
the density of the receiver networks being lower in less
populated areas. Another impact on the remaining error is
connected to the orbit height of the space-borne platform in
low Earth Orbit (LEO) compared to the geostationary orbit of
the GPS satellites. In the past a percentage of 75% has been
used for a case where the orbit height was 514 km [13].
In Table 1 a comparison of two-way delay differences in
meters are given for different TEC values and incidence angles.
For larger incidence angles and higher TEC values, the
difference between higher and lower band-edges becomes up
to 1 m that is not negligible.
IV. DATA BASED CORRECTION ALGORITHMS
In contrast to correction approaches based on external
services, the so-called dual carrier probing [15] aims to retrieve
the TEC based on the measured data itself by exploiting the
bandwidth of the transmitted signals. The basic concept and
underlying idea of dual carrier probing is described in the
following paragraphs in more detail.
A single chirp can be considered as two sub-chirps, where
the data is processed by means of two filters, i.e. one for the
higher sub-band and one for the lower sub-band. By processing
the raw data in this way two images will be obtained which are
both displaced from the ground truth due to the different shift
that applies for the upper sub-band and the lower sub-band.
By determining the corresponding shift between the two
SAR images via co-registration, the values of the TEC are then
retrieved. The state-of-the-art in the co-registration process is
currently in the area of a few percent of the image resolution;
however there are certain requirements of the scene which have
to be satisfied [16]. Although man-made targets with high RCS
are desirable, the features for co-registration do not have to be
necessarily man-made, i.e. also hilltops, structures like land-sea
boundaries etc. may be beneficially exploited. As an exemplary
quantitative evaluation of the dual carrier approach we are
considering two sub-bands for the lower- and the upper half of
the entire bandwidth, in this case a centre frequency of 9 GHz
for the lower half and 11 GHz for the upper half.
471
Fig. 1. Ionospheric two-way delay for different frequencies and incidence Fig. 2. Ionospheric two-way delay for different frequencies and incidence
angles at a total electron content of 5 TECU. The considered bandwidth angles at a total electron content of 5 TECU. The considered
was 300 MHz starting from 9.5 to 9.8 GHz. hypothetical bandwidth was set across the entire X-band i.e. starting
from 8 to 12 GHz.
For a TEC-value of 5 TECU, the difference in the delay in
one-way nadir direction would be 0.0082 m, which is a small
V. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
distance considering the extension of features to be used for
image co-registration. This value has to be considered also in In this contribution wideband signal characteristics of space
light of the reduced resolution in range that results by a borne SAR systems have been investigated with respect to their
reduced bandwidth, because of the inverse proportional significance in terms of atmospheric effects. As a hypothetical
dependence on the range bandwidth to the range resolution. As scenario the most relevant effects for the case of a X-band SAR
an initial critical assessment of usability and technical systems with a bandwidth across the entire X-band spanning
readiness of such techniques in the application of higher from 8-10 GHz was taken. For the tropospheric delays
frequency bands, a final conclusion cannot be drawn based on established blind models can be applied in order to mitigate the
the current status of the presented analysis. While the dual tropospheric delays which are non-dispersive in the considered
carrier probing is in principal physically meaningful, the frequency regime. It has been found that uncorrected
implementation to real-world scenarios is currently not in a ionospheric delay differences are expected to result in
mature status. Initially the dual carrier probing in the context of unfocused images under adverse ionospheric conditions.
SAR has been devised for systems operating in the VHF Therefore the need for introducing a correction term for
domain, which operates at much longer wavelengths and lower adjusting the phase by using external services is strongly
resolution than a hypothetical system under consideration. suggested in order to perform mitigation. Further strategies
An evaluation of the feasibility of these approaches for the towards mitigation techniques based on the large bandwidth
scenario considered in this study remains for future activities are currently under investigation.
since there is a lamentable lack of actual data from systems in
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