LAUSR

In this paper, we analyze the artifacts in synthetic aperture radar imagery due to fluctuations in the refractive index of the atmosphere, specifically due to absorption and variations in speed of light. SAR image reconstruction algorithms ignore absorption and assume unit refractive index. We assume a complex-valued refractive index for the atmosphere and analyze the errors in reconstructed images due to absorption and fluctuations in the speed of electromagnetic (EM) waves. Absorption leads to amplitude errors, which can be viewed as a filtering error. This error can be characterized as systematic variations in the ground reflectivity function. Fluctuations in the speed of EM waves lead to phase errors, which manifest as positioning errors or geometric distortions in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We perform numerical simulations to verify our analysis.