X-band Radar Performance with Medium Grazing Angle Sea-clutter

Inhalt:
Sea-clutter has been studied for many years over a range of sea conditions, polarisations and geometries. The majority of these however have been at low-grazing angles from a cliff-top and do not consider the medium grazing angle region from 15deg to 50deg. The Ingara airborne X-band fully polarimetric radar has been used to collect data in this region to test and modify a series of models to explain the observed sea phenomenology. These models are now used with traditional radar performance measures to characterise the performance of a given radar system. The two analysed in this paper include constant false alarm rate detection with an appropriate choice of threshold and detection probability using Marcum and Swerling target models.