NUMERICAL APPROACH ON DOPPLER SPECTRUM ANALYSIS FOR MOVING TARGETS ABOVE A TIME-EVOLVING SEA SURFACE

In order to analyze the Doppler spectrum of three-dimensional (3-D) moving targets above a time-evolving sea surface, a hybrid method with acceleration techniques is proposed to simulate the electromagnetic (EM) scattering from the composite moving model. This hybrid iterative method combines Kirchhoff approximation (KA) and the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) to solve the EM backscattering from the rough sea surface and the targets, respectively, then mutual EM coupling effects between them are taken into account through an iterative process. To overcome the vast computational cost in the iterative process, acceleration approaches which can greatly reduce the calculation time are applied. Coupling area on the sea surface is truncated according to geometrical optic principle. Then a fast far-field approximation (FAFFA) is applied to speed up the mutual interactions between the targets and the sea surface. A successive iteration method is proposed to reduce the convergence steps for the MLFMA process. The accuracy and efficiency of this hybrid method with accelerations are demonstrated. Doppler spectra of backscattering signals obtained from such numerical EM simulations are compared for different incident angles, target velocities and surface models. The broadening effects of the Doppler spectra due to the mutual EM coupling interactions are studied.