Updated ionospheric module for esa biomass mission end-to-end performance simulator

ESA's BIOMASS is the seventh Earth Explorer mission. It will be devoted to the global monitoring of: 1) above ground forest biomass and biomass change maps with an accuracy < 20%, a 100-200 m spatial resolution, and 6-12 months temporal resolution; 2) global forest disturbance maps with a classification accuracy > 90%, a 50-200 m spatial resolution, and 2-12 months temporal resolution; and 3) global forest height maps with an accuracy of 20-30%, 100 m spatial resolution, and 12 months temporal resolution. BIOMASS is based on a P-band SAR (438 MHz center frequency, 6 MHz bandwidth) orbiting in a dawn-dusk, Sun-synchronous orbit at 674 km, that will systematically acquire fully- (quad-) polarized image data in an interferometric mode over all major forested areas on the globe and a tomographic phase (7 images) to retrieve forest vertical structure information. At P-band ionospheric effects are very important and need to be corrected for. This paper describes the current status of the Ionospheric module for the Biomass End-to-end Performance Simulator (BEEPS-IOM).