A Two-Step Method for Ionospheric Clutter Mitigation for HFSWR With Two-Dimensional Dual-Polarized Received Array

For high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR), the unwanted radio wave originated from the ionosphere is commonly called ionospheric clutter. Its presence seriously affects the performance of the HFSWR and extremely degrades the radar capability to detect target over long distances. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a two-step method for ionospheric clutter mitigation with two-dimensional dual-polarized received array. The proposed method first performs parameter estimation of the clutter, and then gives a polarimetric-adaptive-based oblique projection filter (PAB-OPF) to suppress the clutter. In the first step, due to the fact that vertically and horizontally polarized antennas are at different array elements for reducing mutual coupling and hardware cost, 2-D DOAs are estimated to give phase compensation for polarization phase delay estimation. In the second step, the PAB-OPF is proposed to eliminate phase inconsistency by matching different polarization phase delays for different vertically polarized antennas, and then to suppress the clutter efficiently in space-polarization domain. Error analysis and computational complexity of the proposed method are derived. Experimental results are shown to illustrate the superiority of the proposed method for ionospheric clutter suppression.