Fine imaging of long distance targets can be achieved by the synthetic aperture lidar (SAL). Due to the principle of range Doppler for SAL imaging, loss of altitude information is caused by the mapping for ground scenes to the imaging plane. A 3D reconstruction method of range scanning SAL was proposed in the paper. Multi synthetic aperture images in a certain scanning angle range were obtained by the range scanning SAL. Then, the 3D reconstruction was conducted through the overlap imaging of adjacent strip images for targets. On the basis of results simulated by TerraSAR, the 3D reconstruction for targets was realized using the range scanning SAL.