RADAR PRECIPITATION ECHOES. EXPERIMENTS ON TEMPORAL, SPATIAL, AND FREQUENCY CORRELATION.
Abstract
Radar clutter, the unwanted echoes from the sea, terrain, precipitation, or chaff, can seriously limit radar performance. While numerous clutter rejection techniques have been proposed, the radar engineer has often been unable to evaluate them accurately because descriptions of the properties of the clutter signals are often inaccurate or incomplete. What the engineer needs, then, is a reasonably complete model of the clutter environment. In response to this need, the MRT Group of the Applied Physics Laboratory performed a series of experiments during 1966 to describe the characteristics of clutter in a manner that would suit the needs of the radar engineer. This document summarizes the results of experiments on precipitation clutter. The goal of these experiments was to provide for the radar engineer a description of the spectrum, the spatial uniformity, and the frequency correlation properties of precipitation echoes. These experiments resulted in a more complete description of the clutter spectra than has heretofore been available. The wind shear phenomenon was found to have a dominant effect on the spectra at distant ranges. Other results show that the mean backscatter cross section is rarely uniform in space and that the frequency correlation characteristics confirm the theory predicting that echoes from pulses separated in frequency by at least the reciprocal of the pulse width are uncorrelated.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 01, 1967
- Accession Number
- AD0652818
Entities
People
- F. E. Nathanson
- J. P. Reilly
Organizations
- Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory