Estimation and Compensation of Turbulent Tropospheric Delay in High-Resolution SAR Image

As a typical propagation error, tropospheric delay has been fully considered during synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry and differential interferometry, while the influence on the SAR imaging process is just concerned in advanced configurations, e.g., staring mode, high-resolution, geosynchronous/geostationary (GEO) SAR. In this article, a comprehensive model of turbulent tropospheric delay (TTD), involving atmospheric sciences and fluid mechanics, is introduced, and the influence of which on high-resolution SAR is analyzed. In order to compensate for the influence of TTD in advanced SAR missions, the autofocus method used in motion error compensation is extended, and a 2-D phase error estimation and compensation algorithm is proposed. Subsequently, the simulation experiments of both dot-matrix targets and TerraSAR-X data are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Conclusions and prospects are reached in the end.