Non-coherent Radar Detection Performance in Medium Grazing Angle X-Band Sea Clutter

This paper describes the non-coherent target detection performance of an airborne surface surveillance radar in the presence of medium grazing angle sea clutter. In the absence of frequency agility, the temporal correlation of the sea clutter can be significant and if it is not accounted for in the clutter model, the required signal to interference ratio for a given probability of detection will be incorrect by several decibels, resulting in overestimated performance. This paper describes a robust method for calculating the detection probability for both K and Pareto compound sea-clutter distributions. Empirical models of the amplitude distribution and the speckle correlation are used to determine the expected detection performance given different collection geometries and environmental conditions with the output used to determine the minimum detectable target radar cross section in a detection scenario.