Impact of Flight Disturbances on Airborne Radar Tracking

This correspondence is devoted to the study of the impact of flight disturbances due to the atmospheric turbulence on airborne radar tracking. The performance of a turbulence-ignorant tracking filter is assessed in a turbulent simulated scenario. The turbulence is modelled according to the Dryden model, a correlated, zero-mean, Gaussian random process. A quasi-ellipsoidal racetrack course is chosen for the air platform that carries the radar. The performance of the turbulence-ignorant tracking algorithm is analyzed in terms of mean value and standard deviation of the estimation errors for each component of the position and velocity vectors and compared with the posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (PCRLB), evaluated for the ideal case of absence of platform vibrations.