DAMA—Infrared Sea Modeling and Analysis Software

The performance of infrared (IR) surveillance systems is proportional to the ability of distinguishing the radiance of target from the background. In determining sea radiance as the background, experimental studies are incomplete and very expensive. The few simulation software packages that are available are limited to certain parameters and do not include all aspects of sea radiance. In this paper, simulation and analysis software, namely, InfrareD SeA Modeling and Analysis (DAMA), is developed to calculate the total radiance and its components seen by the observer. The DAMA software allows the user to define all possible parameters related to atmospheric conditions, sea surface conditions, and date and time of observation. The developed software includes all of the three major sea surface models in the IR band provided in the literature, namely, Cox and Munk, Mermelstein, and Shaw and Churnside models. In this sense, the DAMA software is unique in combining all possible atmospheric and surface parameters to provide components of total radiance. The DAMA software can be operated by a user-friendly graphical user interface to facilitate simulations and to analyze the outputs. For this paper, the software has been run for approximately 10 000 simulations to understand the behavior of maritime background in IR. The software is validated by the SEARAD software and measurement results. By this way, for the first time in the open literature, DAMA allows one to observe the behavior of total radiance and its components with respect to the variation of all possible input parameters.