Atmospheric phase screen in Ground-Based RADAR: statistics and compensation

The paper deals with the Atmospheric Phase Screen issue in Ground Based SAR interferometry. The ku-band RADAR used, the “IBIS” by IDS, is capable to continuously image scenes of a few square kilometers with a repeat interval that ranges from a small fraction of a second (in unfocused mode), up to a few minutes (in focused SAR mode). Such features allowed an assessment of the time-varying statistics of the APS, leading to some interesting quantitative considerations. With the aim of estimating and removing the APS from the data, an alternative approach with respect to the currently well-known techniques has been investigated: a compensation strategy based on the available on-site meteo information has indeed been developed. The results of the technique are critically discussed in the case of a real campaign dataset.