Abstract
Synthetic aperture radars (SAR) use microwaves (radio waves ranging from centimeters to meters in length) for imaging the surface of the Earth from airplanes or satellites. From the standpoint of mathematics, SAR imaging is an inverse problem of reconstructing certain characteristics of the target (an area of the Earth’s surface) from the information contained in the radio waves reflected off this target. In practice, SAR technology provides a most viable complement to the aerial or orbital photography in performing a broad variety of observation, monitoring, and surveillance tasks. Indeed, unlike the photography, SAR imaging can be done through clouds. SAR imaging can also be done during nighttime, because it is active. In other words, as opposed to photography that uses solar illumination, SAR actually emits the radio waves that illuminate the target and then constructs the image based on the scattered returns.
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Notes
- 1.
The antenna size plays roughly the same role as the lens diameter in optical imaging.
- 2.
- 3.
This is particularly true in the most typical case of the propagation through a nonideal medium, such as the inhomogeneous atmosphere or ionosphere.
- 4.
See Chapter 2 for the detailed analysis.
- 5.
Except for the standard Coulomb decay of the amplitude, which is inversely proportional to the distance from the antenna.
- 6.
The type of imaging where the antenna emits and receives only one given linear polarization of the interrogating field.
- 7.
This depends on how substantial the variation of the geomagnetic field \(\boldsymbol{H}_{0}\) may be along the path S at the region where the image is taken, see [20].
- 8.
It is the difference between the TEC distributions for two successive data acquisitions.
- 9.
The original ALOS is no longer operational, whereas ALOS-2 is currently in service.
- 10.
Polarimetric SAR imaging exploits two independent (orthogonal) linear polarizations for both the transmitted and received signals.
- 11.
In the conventional theory of SAR imaging, see Chapter 2, the quantity \(1 - n^{2}(\boldsymbol{z})\) defines the ground reflectivity function \(\nu (\boldsymbol{z})\) up to a multiplicative constant.
- 12.
The imaging mode where the pulses are emitted and received by the same antenna.
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Gilman, M., Smith, E., Tsynkov, S. (2017). Introduction. In: Transionospheric Synthetic Aperture Imaging. Applied and Numerical Harmonic Analysis. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52127-5_1
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