Measurement and modelling of bistatic radar sea clutter

Abstract

Bistatic radar is a subject of considerable present interest. Despite this, current understanding of the properties of bistatic clutter, and in particular, bistatic sea clutter, is limited at best. The purpose of this study is to present an analysis of the limited existing published radar data and to derive an empirical model, which expresses the variation of mean s 0 with the measurement geometry and sea conditions. This empirical model is then compared with electromagnetic (EM) scattering calculations using the composite model (sometimes called the two-scale model) to show the extent to which the EM model is able to reproduce the trends observed in the data. The results indicate where improvements to bistatic EM modelling are required (very low grazing angles and out-of-plane scattering), and a general need for more radar data to extend the empirical s 0 model and expand it to the bistatic clutter statistics.

Analysis of bistatic sea clutter - Part I: Average reflectivity

“…It is worth noting that simulations of bistatic sea clutter as reported in [1,35,36], failed to predict the trends observed in this paper and those reported by Ewell and Zehner [6,7] particularly at high wind speed and horizontal polarization. Furthermore, different simulation methods gave different results under similar conditions.…”

“…Rather little information has been published on bistatic radar clutter, and on out-of-plane bistatic sea clutter in particular. For example in [1][2][3][4] only a few experiments on bistatic sea clutter are cited with only one on out-of-plane geometry. This may be due to a number of factors, including the inherent complexity of conducting bistatic radar trials and the resulting lack of high quality bistatic data.…”

First measurements with NeXtRAD, a polarimetric X/L Band radar network

“…The key attribute of NetRAD is that it allows simultaneous measurement to be made of monostatic and bistatic signatures, and hence a direct comparison to be made. In this form NetRAD was used in trials in South Africa to make measurements of bistatic sea clutter and small maritime target signatures, and led to the important conclusion that bistatic sea clutter may be less "spiky" than the equivalent monostatic clutter [4]- [11].…”

Impact of environmental scattering on transmit nulling performance

“…11 for each of the antenna elevation angles considered. An extensive body of work exists in the literature relevant to computing the reflection coefficient Γ from sea surface scattering [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The simplest case is for specular reflection off a smooth sea.…”