Efficient Atmospheric Simulation for High-Resolution Radar Imaging Applications

Numerical simulation can be used for optimizing radar imaging techniques because it allows the accuracy of various techniques to be studied. A simulation of atmospheric conditions by using scatterers in a 3D volume was proposed by Holdsworth and Reid. For this method, the computational burden increases as the square of the number of scatterers. Hence, the simulation can become time consuming if a large number of scatterers is required in order to simulate atmospheric conditions more realistically. A method based on table lookup and linear interpolation is proposed to replace the existing turbulent wind field generation of Holdsworth and Reid. Moreover, this method has the flexibility of incorporating other turbulent wind field data, either measured or modeled. Pseudocode of the simulation using this method is included, and a comparison of the computational burden for each of the techniques is presented.