Refractivity from sea clutter applied on VAMPIRA and Wallops’ 98 data

For coastal and ship-borne survey radars, coverage prediction is a critical question. In sea environment, the spatial variations in temperature conditions involve refractive index gradients and create atmospheric ducts. These events modify the radar coverage in the lower troposphere. A means to retrieve the refractive index gradients in the low troposphere is to use the Refractivity From Clutter (RFC). The principle of RFC is to compute the propagation factor from the radar received power, thus to process it in order to retrieve the refractive index profiles. In this paper, the RFC is applied on data obtained from VAMPIRA and Wallopspsila98 measurement campaigns. Since refractive index quickly varies, fast inversion methods based on a pre-generated database of propagation factors are used.