About the Impact of System Noise in Antenna Pattern Measurements over Rain Forest with TerraSAR-X

Conference: EUSAR 2014 - 10th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
06/03/2014 - 06/05/2014 at Berlin, Germany

Proceedings: EUSAR 2014

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Bachmann, Markus; Castellanos Alfonzo, Gabriel; Kraus, Thomas; Steinbrecher, Ulrich; Schwerdt, Marco; Zink, Manfred (Microwaves and Radar Institute, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany)

Abstract:
The measurement of antenna patterns over Amazon rain forest is a widely used technique to determine or verify the antenna patterns of space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems. This paper describes the impact of the system noise on these antenna pattern measurements over rain forest. The paper first theoretically derives the effect of noise injected in the instrument receive chain on SAR images. The approach is then validated using real SAR data acquired over ocean and over rain forest with TerraSAR-X. Finally, antenna pattern measurements performed for the new TerraSAR-X imaging mode WideScanSAR are analyzed, as the impact of system noise in this mode is higher than in other modes.