Radar modelling to improve CFAR performance in the littoral

Littoral operation of radars poses severe signal processing difficulties due to the highly stressing, inhomogeneous clutter. This report describes an initial investigation into the feasibility of utilising site specific radar modelling to provide a localized estimate of the clutter statistics which can then be used to predict the required threshold to maintain a given false alarm rate. The technique has been applied to littoral clutter recordings obtained from the experimental S-band phase array radar, MESAR2. Results are presented for the technique in comparison with a conventional, non-adaptive, cell averaging CFAR. The paper concludes that significant performance enhancements are possible through the use of this new technique.