Equatorial Ionospheric Scintillation Measurement in Advanced Land Observing Satellite Phased Array-Type L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar Observations

Amplitude stripes imposed by ionospheric scintillation have been frequently observed in many of the equatorial nighttime acquisitions of the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array-type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR). This type of ionospheric artifact impedes PALSAR interferometric and polarimetric applications, and its formation cause, morphology, and negative influence have been deeply investigated. However, this artifact can provide an alternative opportunity in a positive way for probing and measuring ionosphere scintillation. In this paper, a methodology for measuring ionospheric scintillation parameters from PALSAR images with amplitude stripes is proposed. Firstly, sublook processing is beneficial for recovering the scattered stripes from a single-look complex image; the amplitude stripe pattern is extracted via band-rejection filtering in the frequency domain of the sublook image. Secondly, the amplitude spectrum density function (SDF) is estimated from the amplitude stripe pattern. Thirdly, a fitting scheme for measuring the scintillation strength and spectrum index is conducted between the estimated and theoretical long-wavelength SDFs. In addition, another key parameter, the scintillation index, can be directly measured from the amplitude stripe pattern or indirectly derived from the scintillation strength and spectrum index. The proposed methodology is fully demonstrated on two groups of PALSAR acquisitions in the presence of amplitude stripes. Self-validation is conducted by comparing the measured and derived scintillation index and by comparing the measurements of range lines and azimuth lines. Cross-validation is performed by comparing the PALSAR measurements with in situ Global Position System (GPS) measurements. The processing results demonstrate a powerful capability to robustly measure ionospheric scintillation parameters from space with high spatial resolution.