Mitigation of atmospheric perturbations and solid Earth movements in a TerraSAR-X time-series

The TerraSAR-X (TSX) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) marks the recent emergence of a new generation of spaceborne radar sensors that can for the first time lay claim to localization accuracies in the sub-meter range. The TSX platform’s extremely high orbital stability and the sensor’s hardware timing accuracy combine to enable direct measurements of atmospheric refraction and solid Earth movements. By modeling these effects for individual TSX acquisitions, absolute pixel geolocation accuracy on the order of several centimeters can be achieved without need for even a single tiepoint. A 16-month time series of images was obtained over a fixed test site, making it possible to validate both an atmospheric refraction and a solid Earth tide model, while at the same time establishing the instrument’s long-term stability. These related goals were achieved by placing trihedral corner reflectors (CRs) at the test site and estimating their phase centers with centimeter-level accuracy using differential GPS (DGPS). Oriented in pairs toward a given satellite track, the CRs could be seen as bright “points” in the images, providing a geometric reference set. SAR images from the high-resolution spotlight (HS) mode were obtained in alternating ascending and descending orbit configurations. The highest-resolution products were selected for their small sample dimensions, as positions can be more precisely determined. Based on the delivered product annotations, the CR image positions were predicted, and these predictions were compared with their measured image positions both before and after compensation for atmospheric refraction and systematic solid Earth deviations. It was possible to show that when the atmospheric distortion and Earth tides are taken into account, the TSX HS products have geolocation accuracies far exceeding the specified requirements. Furthermore, this accuracy was maintained for the duration of the 16-month test period. It could be demonstrated that with a correctly calibrated sensor, and after accounting for atmospheric and tidal effects, tiepoint-free geolocation is possible with TSX with an absolute product accuracy of about 5 cm.