Geosynchronous SAR raw data simulator in presence of ionospheric scintillation using reverse backprojection

The future L‐band geosynchronous synthetic aperture radar (GEO SAR) system will be inevitably affected by ionospheric scintillation. Due to the lack of the real system, it is necessary to achieve the scintillation‐affected GEO SAR raw data for the research of influential mechanism and correction strategies. A method for the generation of scintillation‐affected GEO SAR raw data is proposed that utilises the reverse backprojection (ReBP) to efficiently and accurately modulate the scintillation transfer function on GEO SAR signals. A simulation experiment for a real SAR scene from one of the ALOS‐PALSAR observation is operated in case of the current inclined L‐band GEO SAR system configuration. The simulation takes less time by using the ReBP, compared with the existent method, and shows the speckle‐like phase error similar to the injected scintillation phase error, which validates the nice efficiency and accuracy of the proposed methodology.