Ionospheric Electron Concentration Effects on SAR and INSAR

The launch of ALOS and the high potential expected for the L-band PALSAR motivated us to investigate ionospheric electron concentration effects using JERS L-band SAR data acquired at high latitudes. An important focus of our work was on the identification of ionospheric effects and resulted in methodologies to detect ionospheric effects in single SAR acquisitions as well as in repeat-orbit pairs. For cases where significant ionospheric anomalies are present, procedures to improve SAR offset tracking and interferometric results are proposed and the retrieval of free electron density maps is discussed.