Study on Ionospheric Effects on SAR and their Statistics

The objective of this work is to study the impact of ionospheric disturbances on the Sentinel-1 mission. First we realize an ionospheric statistics database based on global TEC models and maps. Then we process interferometric stacks of Sentinel-1 images using the split-spectrum method to estimate the differential ionosphere and validate the GNSS based statistics. We use the newly developed database to determine the expected average and maximum ionospheric errors on Sentinel-1 SAR measurements. We discuss the possibility to routinely include flags or corrections for ionospheric disturbances in Sentinel-1 products.