Abstract Accurate motion compensation is a key issue for high-resolution airborne SAR imaging. In order to attain high-quality squint SAR images, it is detailedly discussed that Extended Wavenumber Domain (EWD) algorithm combines two-step motion compensation technique processing squint SAR data affected by motion error in the paper,a kind of method of squint EWD algorithm is put forward, simulation and real SAR data processing results with this method are given to prove the feasibility of such algorithm.