Ionospheric Correction of InSAR Time Series Analysis of C-band Sentinel-1 TOPS Data

Abstract

The Copernicus Sentinel-1A/B satellites operating at C-band in terrain observation by progressive scans (TOPS) mode bring unprecedented opportunities for measuring large-scale tectonic motions using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). Although the ionospheric effects are only about one-sixteenth of those at L-band, the measurement accuracy might still be degraded by long-wavelength signals due to the ionosphere. We implement the range split-spectrum method for correcting ionospheric effects in InSAR with C-band Sentinel-1 TOPS data. We perform InSAR time series analysis and evaluate these ionospheric effects using data acquired on both ascending (dusk-side of the Sentinel-1 dawn-dusk orbit) and descending (dawn-side) tracks over representative midlatitude and low-latitude (geomagnetic latitude) areas. We find that the ionospheric effects are very strong for data acquired at low latitudes on ascending tracks. For other cases, ionospheric effects are not strong or even negligible. The application of the range split-spectrum method, despite some implementation challenges, largely removes ionospheric effects, and thus improves the InSAR time series analysis results.