Clutter Mapping for Airborne Pulse Doppler Radar

This paper presents a quick and simple method to model the surface clutter map of an airborne radar operating in a medium pulse repetition frequency (PRF) mode and in a look-down scenario. The basic model derives a clutter map in the range/velocity detection space of the radar specific to each PRF used within the radar schedule. Additional functionality may be introduced which permits regions of differing clutter statistics to be defined and which computes target detectability over the range/velocity detection space of the radar. The models described here have been used successfully in a variety of research tasks to optimise PRF selection and weighting functions of a phased array antenna.