Polar Ionosphere Irregularity Structure and Dynamics by means of X-band Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar

The ionosphere effects on microwave propagation and degrades the image quality of space-borne SAR acquisitions. Despite of its reduced effect at high frequencies, phase distortions on the interferograms are often visible on X-band TSX/TDX data. In this paper, the ionospheric phase distortions associated with the small-scale irregularities in TSX/TDX pursuit mode interferograms are analysed. A coincident strong ionospheric drift in the along-track direction is observed by the ground-based high frequency (HF) measurements of SuperDARN. The ionospheric phases are separated from the topographic contributions by using parallax, and the ionospheric altitudes are estimated from the SAR data and cross-validated against SuperDARN data.