Techniques for higher order analysis of radar clutter and their application to L-band live data

We design two statistical tests to ascertain whether radar data comply with the hypotheses of multivariate Gaussianity and covariance persymmetry. For the first issue, we develop a statistical procedure based on quadratic distributional distances, which exploits the representation of Gaussian vectors in generalized spherical coordinates. Moreover, in order to analyze the persymmetry property of the disturbance covariance matrix, we design a testing procedure based on the generalized likelihood ratio test. We thus apply the new tests to L-band experimentally measured clutter data, collected by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory phase one radar, at the Katahdin Hill site.