Ground based MIMO SAR and land clutter modelling: Difficulties and guidelines

The term clutter is usually adopted for pointing out unwanted echoes in radar systems. Such echoes are typically returned from ground, sea, rain, animals/insects, chaff and atmospheric turbulences, and can cause serious performance issues with radar systems. Data analysis of clutter echoes is therefore one of the most important tasks in radar signal analysis and system design, especially in case of target tracking or target classification. The paper is addressed for understainding the difficulties in modelling the clutter when the range of interest changes. Obtained results have shown that it is impossible to have a global statistical model for the clutter, depending on the operating geometry of the system.