Ionospheric clutter model for high frequency surface wave radar

The detection performance of a high frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) system is primarily limited by clutter, especially ionospheric clutter. Therefore, in order to analyze and/or simulate the capabilities of an HFSWR system a model for the clutter is required. This paper develops and tests a new radio wave propagation theory to model ionospheric clutter. The model is based on path integrals of ray tracing equations which predict the phase power spectrum of clutter due to irregularities in the plasma. This power spectrum is then used to simulate three-dimensional space-time-range radar data cubes. The accuracy of the model is tested by comparing the simulated data to measured data cubes. As an application, the data is then used to evaluate the performance of the newly developed fast fully adaptive processing scheme to mitigate clutter.