Adaptive ionospheric distortion correction techniques for HF skywave radar

This paper addresses the problem of adaptive decontamination of HF radar signals corrupted by propagation through the ionosphere. Ensembles of radar returns from adjacent resolution cells experiencing highly correlated contamination are used to provide stochastic identification of multiplicative phase smearing, as distinct from the occurrence of superimposed multimode returns. A MUSIC-type procedure is elaborated for estimating the phase path smearing function. For the multimode contamination situation, a constrained spectral deconvolution approach is developed to estimate the corresponding single-mode spectrum. Simulations and real data are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods.