A ground clutter computation procedure for airborne pulse Doppler radars

The precise computation of ground clutter in airborne pulse Doppler radars relates to integrating on the range-Doppler cells. Ringel M.B presented a procedure, which is the classic procedure for computing ground clutter range-Doppler spectrum. But this procedure is very complex, which needs to resolve points of intersection and determine integration boundary in right-angle coordinates, then translate into spherical coordinates to calculate the integration. In order to decrease the calculation complexity of Ringel´s method, the expressions of the range-Doppler cell boundary in spherical coordinates are derived and a procedure for computing the ground clutter range-Doppler spectrum only in spherical coordinates is described. Compared with, the performance of the procedure is equivalent, but the complexity of which is much less due to take advantage of the geometry characteristics of the range-Doppler cells. Finally the validity of this procedure is demonstrated through simulation.