Atmospheric Artifact Compensation in Ground-Based DInSAR Applications

In this letter, a coherence-based technique for atmospheric artifact removal in ground-based (GB) zero-baseline synthetic aperture radar (SAR) acquisitions is proposed. For this purpose, polarimetric measurements acquired using the GB-SAR sensor developed at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya are employed. The heterogeneous environment of Collserola Park in the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain, was selected as the test area. Data sets were acquired at X-band during one week in June 2005. The effects of the atmosphere variations between successive zero-baseline SAR polarimetric acquisitions are treated here in detail. The need to compensate for the resulting phase-difference errors when retrieving interferometric information is put forward. A compensation technique is then proposed and evaluated using the control points placed inside the observed scene.