Influence of Precipitation Environment in Multi-Band 3-D Complex Objects SAR Imaging

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is generally considered as an all-time and all-weather system. However, weather conditions will sometimes still affect the SAR imaging, especially when rain rate or operating frequencies are increased. In this paper, the influence of rainfall attenuation in multi-band 3-D complex target SAR imaging is investigated. As SAR echo can be considered as scattering from the target illuminated by incident wave, physical optics (PO) method is used to compute the scattered data because of its good balance between efficiency and accuracy in high frequency band. Numerical results demonstrate the rain attenuation impact on SAR image, when the relationship between rain rate and precipitation attenuation in multi-frequency band are quantitative analyzed.