The effect of ionospheric scintillation on phase gradient autofocus processing of synthetic aperture radar

Depending on the transmission frequency and signal bandwidth, space based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) may be impacted by disturbances caused by small-scale structured ionization. This paper considers the effects of scintillation (variations in amplitude and phase) on a narrow band SAR that utilizes the phase-gradient autofocus (PGA) method that attempts to compensate for the effects of phase errors across the synthetic aperture.