Focused synthetic aperture radar processing of ice-sounder data collected over the Greenland ice sheet

©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.We developed a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing algorithm for airborne/spaceborne ice-sounding radar systems and applied it to data collected in Greenland. By using focused SAR (phase-corrected coherent averaging), we improved along-track resolution by a factor of four and provided a 6-dB processing gain over unfocused SAR (coherent averaging without phase correction) based on a point-target analysis for a Greenland ice-sounding data set. Also, we demonstrated that the focused-SAR processing reduced clutter and enabled us to identify bedrock-interface returns buried in clutter. Using focused-SAR technique, we processed data collected over a key 360-km-long portion of the 2000-m contour line of southwest Greenland. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first high-quality radar ice thickness measurements over this key location. Moreover, these ice-thickness measurements have been used for improving mass-balance estimates of the Greenland ice sheet