Atmospheric precipitation impact on synthetic aperture radar imagery: Numerical model at X and KA bands

Recent spaceborne polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radars (SARs) enable the complete characterization of target scattering and extinction properties. Several missions are operating at X band while there are plans and analyses for systems operating at higher frequencies, such as Ka band. Systems operating at these frequencies have interesting and distinctive applications in the field of geosciences such as Cartography, Surface deformation detection, Forest cover mapping and many others. However, the detected ground surface response can be affected by atmospheric effects in both signal amplitude and phase, especially in presence of atmospheric precipitations. In this work we will introduce a simulation framework developed to characterize how precipitating clouds affect spaceborne X- and Ka-band SARs systems. The proposed framework is able to simulate the polarimetric SAR ground responses in terms of Normalized Radar Cross Sections (NRCS) and complex correlation coefficient, both for realistic atmosphere-ground scenarios and for synthetic canonical ones. Some preliminary results will be shown and discussed.