Low-Angle Radar Land Clutter

4.7 SUMMARY

Chapter 4 describes a number of approaches for modeling low-angle land clutter in surface-sited radar. As a physical phenomenon, the most salient attribute of low-angle clutter is variability. Two important ways in which this variability is evidenced are patchiness in spatial occurrence and extremely wide cell-to-cell statistical fluctuation in clutter strength (i.e., spikiness) within patches. A site-specific approach to clutter modeling is described based on the use of digitized terrain elevation data (DTED) at each site, which captures both of these basic attributes—patchiness, via deterministic computation of geometric terrain visibility from the radar site; and spikiness, via realizations from statistical distributions in which ...