Multichannel Analysis and Suppression of Sea Clutter for Airborne Microwave Radar Systems

One efficient method to detect slow targets with low signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratios is space-time adaptive processing (STAP). To apply STAP to maritime radar systems, the multichannel properties of sea clutter have to be known. This paper investigates these characteristics for airborne microwave radar systems to detect vessels in the open sea. It is shown that the motion of sea echoes and different sea scattering types cause different multichannel properties of sea clutter compared with land clutter. This paper provides a mathematical basis to describe multichannel sea clutter and predict STAP performance over water. To confirm the derived properties, several real multichannel sea data sets for different swell directions and sea states were acquired with the airborne radar system Phased Array Multifunctional Imaging Radar (PAMIR), and simulations were conducted. This paper demonstrates the reproducibility of real sea clutter multichannel characteristics for different sea conditions with the help of calculations and simulations, which are proposed in this analysis.