Sea clutter measurement on the Yellow Sea using an instrumentation radar

In a maritime environment, sea clutter is one of the most important factors to be considered in operating radars. It is difficult to describe the characteristics of sea clutter as a simple model because sea clutter is dependent on each radar system and many other environmental parameters. Usually an expensive special system is used to obtain sea clutter data. However, we tried to acquire the sea clutter data using an instrumentation radar, AN/TPQ-39 with some additional equipment. The data were acquired on the Yellow Sea, with varying grazing angles at a few sea states. The results showed that the amplitude statistics of the observed sea clutter fit into the Weibull distribution well. We also proposed a simplified model for the backscattering coefficient of sea clutter on the Yellow Sea at X-band.