Elongation Orientation of Equatorial Ionospheric Irregularities in Spaceborne SAR Images

In this paper, the rod-like ionospheric irregularities distributed in the equatorial regions are described by theoretically deriving the structure elongation orientation in the observation geometry of the spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Thus it denotes that the elongation orientation is mainly determined by the geomagnetic heading and inclination angles for a given SAR mode, which is verified by both the phase screen (PS) simulations and real data validations.