In this paper a SAR simulator able to provide images presenting appropriate speckle statistics is introduced. The simulator is able to generate both Exponential (fully developed speckle) and K-distributed speckle statistics, according to surface and radar parameters. It is based on sound physical models for the evaluation of the number of equivalent scatterers per resolution cell. The proposed simulator requires as inputs the radar, orbital and surface parameters. The statistics relevant to

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... single equivalent scatterer are then effectively generated as a 2-D scale mixture of Gaussians and the global statistics of the return from each resolution cell are obtained as the coherent sum of all the scatterers contributions. The rationale of the proposed simulation framework is detailed and meaningful results regarding the analysis of the first simulated images are discussed.