AN INVESTIGATION ON ATMOSPHERIC EFFECTS IN AIRBORNE INTERFEROMETRIC SAR DATA

The results of an experiment on atmospheric effects in in-terferometric SAR data are presented. The main purpose of the experiment was to investigate on the influence of the troposphere on airborne synthetic aperture radar mea-surements, acquired by DLR’s experimental E-SAR sys-tem. The analysed data was acquired at L-band. The main idea behind the experiment is to collect data sets at different atmospheric conditions and to compare the measurements by performing a differential interferomet-ric analysis. The main difference between atmospheric conditions on ”Day-one ” and ”Day-two ” of acquisition was cloud layer between sensor and illuminated surface, reaching from 750 to 1500 m above sea-level (msl). The sensor altitude was about 3000 m (msl). The test site is located at 580 m (msl). The results of the experiment will be highlighted and an interpretation of the observed differential effects will be given. In a first investigation [1] no pronounced indication of atmospheric effects in L-band interferograms was found. In this contribution, two different techniques, multisquint [6] and Weighted Phase Curvature Autofocus (WPCA) [3], are applied to accurately mitigate residual motion errors allowing for a better interpretation of any possible atmospheric effects