The Importance of Sea Clutter Modeling

There is a large body of literature on sea-clutter analysis and modelling. However, these are mostly from radars with coarse resolution with data collected at low grazing angles. Newer maritime airborne radars which operate at higher resolutions and from higher grazing angles will therefore require newer models to characterise the sea-clutter. The DST Group Ingara medium grazing angle dataset was collected for this purpose and has resulted in a significant amount of work both internally at the DST Group and through the NATO SET-185 group on high grazing angle sea-clutter. This talk discusses the modelling of this data set and its application to realistic sea-clutter simulation and performance prediction modelling.