Research on ionospheric effects and error calibration for L-band spaceborne D-InSAR

At L-band, the ionosphere is assumed to have considerable effects on differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (D-InSAR) image quality [1]. This paper focuses on ionospheric propagation effects from difference of slant range total electron content (ΔSTEC) and error calibration for D-InSAR. Referring to International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model, we simulate the distribution of ionosphere slant range total electron content (STEC) in Hainan. Then the phase error and deformation error from ionospheric effects are analyzed. The performance of two ionospheric correction methods is also given. The `group-phase delay difference method' [2] is expected to have a lower precision than the `spectrum-split method' [3] in the limit of regular image registration accuracy. Some suggestions about the smoothing window of the latter are given. Finally, with updated SBRAS simulator, an L-band D-InSAR simulation experiment is conducted and the `spectrum-split method' is validated. Experiment results show that about 0.02TECU ΔSTEC and less than 1cm residual deformation error from ionospheric effects are available for L-band D-InSAR.