The ARPA/NAVY Mountaintop Program: adaptive signal processing for airborne early warning radar

The Mountaintop Program is an ARPA/NAVY sponsored initiative started in 1990 to study advanced processing techniques and technologies required to support the mission requirements of next generation airborne early warning (AEW) platforms. Central to the effort is a surveillance radar measurements program executed from various mountaintop locations including field sites at the White Sands Missile Range (WMSR), New Mexico and the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF), Hawaii. The program is collecting data to support the evaluation of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithms and the characterization and modeling of monostatic and bistatic scattering. Some of the data collected is hosted in CREST, the Common Research Environment for STAP, at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) and is accessible to the digital signal processing community via the World Wide Web. A subset of that data has been provided for inclusion in the IEEE Signal Processing Information Base at Rice University. This paper includes a discussion of program objectives and test segments and a description of the program´s assets, field sites, and data product. A companion off-line demonstration of AEW signal processing concepts, using Mountaintop data available at the MHPCC, is planned