Passive Bistatic Sea Clutter Statistics From Spaceborne Illuminators

The ability to use external illuminators of opportunity will be an important feature for future maritime radar systems. This article considers passive bistatic radar operation using the Sirius-XM and Optus-D3 broadcast satellites. These operate in different frequency bands and with different bistatic geometries and bandwidths. In order to evaluate radar detection performance, generate realistic sea clutter, and develop suitable detection schemes, we require an understanding of the sea clutter statistics. For the data studied here, we consider both the delay-Doppler and time-Doppler domains and include an analysis of the amplitude distribution, temporal correlation, and Doppler spectrum.