Amplitude statistics of ground clutter from town and hill observed by an S-band radar

Summary We have observed ground clutter from a town and hills using an S‐band radar with a frequency of 3.05 GHz, a beamwidth of 1.8°, and a pulse width of 1.0 µs, located on the campus of the National Defense Academy in Yokosuka City. To investigate such ground clutter amplitude statistics, we introduce a compound distribution and the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). We have found that the ground clutter amplitude obeys the compound lognormal distribution with shape parameters of σ1 = 0.424, σ2 = 0.232 for the entire data and the compound lognormal and compound log‐Weibull distributions with shape parameters of σ1 = 0.217 to 0.429, σ2 = 0.028 to 0.410, and c1 = 9.36 to 11.20 and c2 = 17.00 to 23.81, respectively, for data within the beamwidth of an antenna. The numbers for the minimum AIC (MAIC) of the compound lognormal and log‐Weibull distributions are 8 and 4, respectively. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 96(7): 42–51, 2013; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ecj.11407