Time- and Space-Varying Atmospheric Phase Correction in Discontinuous Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar Deformation Monitoring

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2018-11, Vol.18 (11), p.3883
• Main Authors: Huang, Zengshu, Sun, Jinping, Li, Qing, Tan, Weixian, Huang, Pingping, Qi, Yaolong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: atmospheric phase correction; coherent scatterers; deformation monitoring; discontinuous GB-SAR; time- and space-varying characteristic
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s18113883

Ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GB-SAR) uses active microwave remote-sensing observation mode to achieve two-dimensional deformation measurement and deformation trend extraction, which shows great prospects in the field of deformation monitoring. However, in the process of GB-SAR deformation monitoring, the disturbances caused by atmospheric effect cannot be neglected, and the atmospheric phases will seriously affect the precision of deformation monitoring. In discontinuous GB-SAR deformation monitoring mode, the atmospheric phases are particularly affected by changes of time and space, so the traditional models of atmospheric phase correction are no longer applicable. In this paper, the interferometric phase signal model considering atmospheric phase is first established. Then, the time- and space-varying characteristics of the atmospheric phase are analyzed, and a novel time- and space-varying atmospheric phase correction algorithm, based on coherent scatterers analysis, is proposed. Finally, slope deformation monitoring experiments are carried out to verify the validity and robustness of the proposed algorithm.