ATMOSPHERIC CORRECTION METHOD FOR INTERFEROMETRIC SYNTHETIC ARRAY RADAR SYSTEMS OPERATING AT LONG RANGE

A method of computing and correcting phase errors due to atmospheric turbulence in a dual-antenna multiple-pass synthetic array radar (SAR) interferometer system. The method improves topographic mapping accuracy at very long ranges. The method computes an atmospheric correction from the residual phase difference between a two-pass interferometer output (containing atmospheric phase errors) and a dual-antenna single-pass interferometer output (for which atmospheric phase errors cancel because the two channels are collected simultaneously). The residual phase measured in a single resolution element is then filtered by averaging over an area of many resolution elements, typically on the order of several thousand resolution elements. This exploits the long correlation distance of the atmospheric phase errors to reconstruct the dominant low-frequency part of the error spectrum. In addition, unwrapping the phase of the output of the complex Wiener filter produces an atmospheric turbulence measurement map.