Land clutter models for radar design and analysis

Land clutter reflectivity has been described in the literature for many types of terrain, viewed by radars of different frequencies at different grazing angles. Significant gaps remain in the published data, especially for ground-based radars viewing the terrain at grazing incidence, and for bistatic situations where one path is at grazing incidence. An analytical model is proposed here which predicts many of the observed trends in data, as functions of range, antenna height, terrain roughness, and radar wavelength. By comparing measured data to the model, better correlations among data sets taken under different conditions can be obtained, and better understanding of the underlying propagation and scattering phenomena achieved.