Coordinate Registration for Over-the-Horizon Radar Using Reference Sources and the IRI Model

In this paper, to improve the localization accuracy of over-the-horizon radar, a coordinate registration method based on the International Reference Ionospheric model and reference sources is developed. We use the reference sources to estimate the ionospheric activity indices which are then used to perform coordinate registration of targets of interest. We model the ionospheric activity indices via a Gaussian Markov random field for taking into account of their spatial variation. Considering the prior information of the ionospheric activity indices and using the measurements of reference sources, we formulate the estimation of ionospheric activity indices as a Bayesian inverse problem. To deal with the high dimensionality of the Gaussian Markov random field, we use the Gibbs sampling method to estimate the posterior probability distribution of the ionospheric activity indices. Convergence and effectiveness of the sampling method are analyzed. The simulation results show that, comparing with using the prior mean of ionospheric activity indices, the proposed method can greatly improve the accuracy of coordinate registration (CR).