In order to study the influence of atmospheric turbulence on the image of synthetic aperture lidar (SAL),based on Monte-Carlo random factor,numerical simulation of phase screens following the Kolmogorov spectrum is introduced.The SAL images with different turbulence and different wavelengths are calculated.Additionally,with different wavelengths and slant ranges,the relations of turbulence intensity and the ratio of synthetic aperture length to atmospheric coherent length are analyzed.The results show that the atmospheric turbulence can severely affect the azimuth resolution of the SAL image.With the increase of turbulence intensity,SAL imaging defocus is becoming more and more serious,and eventually the target can not be distinguished.With the same turbulence intensity,when the beam wavelength is longer,the SAL image quality is better.For the distortion of SAL image caused by turbulence effect,improved rank one phase error estimation (IROPE) method is used to compensate the phase errors.When the atmospheric coherent length is greater than the real aperture length,IROPE method can effectively improve the focusing effect of images and increase the imaging resolution.