Can the DS technique help to mitigate atmospheric phase delay artifacts in ground-based SAR interferograms of natural scenes?

In this work, we review the implementation of the Distributed Scatterer (DS) technique in the processing pipeline of ground-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GBSAR) interferometry.DS consists of a group of pixels that individually have a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) but can collectively enhance SNR through statistical processing, as they are assumed to share the same underlying deformation signal.Despite its advantages, the DS-based InSAR technique has seen limited application in GBSAR due to the typically high SNR of GBSAR data and its predominant use in infrastructure monitoring with lots of already reliable scatterers.A DS-based InSAR technique adapted to GBSAR data characteristics is proposed here.The method is tested on SAR images acquired by a GBSAR system over a scene, primarily covered by rocks and bare soils, covered by short vegetation -conditions that are wellsuited for DS analysis.We compare the interferograms generated using the proposed DS approach with those obtained through the conventional multi-looking method and study how they could affect the subsequent atmospheric correction process, which is a crucial step of GBSAR interferometry.