IL NUOVO CIMENTO Vol. 24 C, N. 1 Gennaio-Febbraio 2001 Simulation of interferometric SAR raw signals relevant to actual ground sites( * ) G. Franceschetti( 1 ), A. Iodice( 1 ), M. Migliaccio( 2 )( 3 )( ** ) and D. Riccio( 1 )( 2 )( *** ) ( 1 ) Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Universit` a di Napoli “Federico II” Via Claudio 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy ( 2 ) IRECE - CNR - Via Diocleziano 328, 80124 Napoli, Italy ( 3 ) DIEE, Universit` a di Cagliari - Piazza D’Armi 19, 09123 Cagliari, Italy (ricevuto il 26 Ottobre 1999; approvato l’ 11 Maggio 2000) Summary. — An efficient and reliable simulation scheme is of great relevance for the interpretation of the real campaign data analysis and the testing of the different interferometric procedures. In a previous work, an interferometric SAR (INSAR) raw signal simulator has been presented and tested versus canonical scenes. In this paper, a simulation over an actual ground site is presented and discussed in order to fully validate the simulator and to show how it can be employed to get some insight into the physical mechanisms governing the interferogram formation. Use of the simulator is finally suggested in order to support a classification scheme based on INSAR coherency maps. PACS 84.40.Xb – Telemetry: remote control, remote sensing; radar. PACS 91.10.Jf – Topography; geometric observations. 1. – Introduction Across-track SAR interferometry (INSAR) is a remote-sensing tool able to generate a high-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the area under survey by combining two complex SAR images of the same scene acquired from two slightly different look angles [1]. The DEM generation, however, requires some rather delicate processing steps. First of all, a phase-preserving focusing of the raw signals in order to get the two single look complex images must be accomplished [2]; then registration of these two images ( * ) Paper presented at the the Workshop on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Florence, 25-26 February, 1998. ( ** ) E-mail: migliaccio@nava1.uninav.it ( *** ) E-mail: daniele.riccio@unina.it c  Societ` a Italiana di Fisica 193