Surface clutter analysis and ranging sidelobe level requirements for spaceborne meteorological radars

Pulse compression techniques are very attractive in the development of new-generation spaceborne meteorological radars, because it has the advantages to reduce the transmit power requirements and improve the measurement precision by increasing incoherent average samples. Compared with TRMM, which employed a pulsed-CW signal, it is very important to analyze the effect of surface clutter from ranging sidelobes of the returned signal after pulse compression. In this paper, the effect of surface clutter with different antenna sidelobe levels and different ranging sidelobe levels are analyzed in details. Based on the analysis of surface clutter, the requirements for antenna sidelobe level and pulse compression range sidelobe level are proposed.