Localised three-dimensional adaptive spatial-temporal processing for airborne radar

Radar space-time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques have classically focused on azimuth-Doppler adaptivity while placing minimal emphasis on elevation. Elevation adaptivity offers significant clutter suppression improvement, allowing further suppression of interference sources having identical Doppler and azimuth as the expected target. Work is presented which incorporates elevation adaptivity using two approaches: a factored approach and a joint domain approach, both greatly improving clutter suppression performance. The proposed concepts are validated using results based on simulated range ambiguous airborne radar data. Target detection improvements on the order of 8 dB and 10 dB (as compared to standard 2D-JDL processing) are demonstrated for the factored and joint domain approaches, respectively, using an 8 × 8 nonuniform rectangular array.