Effect of terrain modeling and internal clutter motion on space based radar performance

This paper addresses the impact of Weibull-type terrain modeling and wind motion on target detection performance from a space based radar platform. For "site-specific simulation effects", a NASA map provides terrain information that is used to generate scattered returns from the field of view. This land cover map categorizes the Earth into 16 land types (desert, lake, forest, etc.) with specific grazing angle dependent mean radar cross section values that can be characterized using Weibull-type distributions. Wind induced internal clutter motion (ICM) is modeled using the Billingsley spectrum. Depending on the carrier frequency and wind speed, it is possible to model the ICM as equivalent to a low-order sum of damped sinusoids and decaying exponentials. Performance analysis shows that increasing wind speed results in inferior performance in general, whereas for a given clutter-to-noise ratio, non-uniform terrain significantly affects performance.