STAP application in mountainous terrain: Challenges and strategies

This paper describes the results of a study to evaluate ground moving target indication (GMTI) challenges in mountainous terrain and identify new exploitation methods to enhance the capabilities of a nominal X-band radar system. Through simulation and analysis we describe the difficulties inherent in space-time adaptive processing (STAP) GMTI in highly mountainous terrain. We use intermediate performance metrics, such as detection rate and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) losses over range and Doppler, to identify physical mechanisms leading to STAP inefficiency and characterize the benefits of improvement strategies, such as Power Comparable Training (PCT), a data-dependent training method. The focus of this effort is to understand factors adversely affecting the detection of surface targets, including vehicles and dismounts; document the performance impacts; and, identify a plausible solution space.