Ionospheric Phase Screen Compensation for the Sentinel-1 TOPS and ALOS-2 ScanSAR Modes

Variations of the ionosphere can significantly disrupt synthetic aperture radar (SAR) acquisitions and interferometric measurements of ground deformation. In this paper, we show how the ionosphere can also strongly modify C-band interferograms despite its smaller influence at higher frequencies. Thus, ionospheric phase screens should not be neglected: their compensation improves the estimation of ground deformation maps. The split-spectrum method is able to estimate the dispersive ionospheric component of the interferometric phase; we describe the implementation of this method for the burst modes TOPS and ScanSAR to estimate and remove ionospheric phase screens. We present Sentinel-1 interferograms of the 2016 Taiwan earthquake and ALOS-2 interferograms of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, which show strong ionospheric phase gradients, and their corrected versions. Finally, to validate the results and better understand the origin of these ionospheric variations, we compare the estimated differential ionosphere with global Total Electron Content maps and local Global Positioning System measurements.