Airborne Radar Clutter Suppression Technology Research

In a look down airborne radar, ground clutter is very strong, usually muchstronger than ground target retums. Qwing to the radar platform motion, clutterreturns in the airbome radar are Doppler shifted and have Doppler spectral spreading.Conventional airborne radar clutter suppression techniques utilize the difference inDoppler frequency domain between clutter and target returns to suppress clutter, i.e.Doppler frequency domain One-dimension adaptive filtering, which usually used inmain-lobe clutter suppression. For slow target whose Doppler frequencies fall intoclutter Doppler band, the performance of frequency domain one-dimension filtering isseriously degraded. In an airborne radar, there is a interdependence to clutter Dopplerfrequency and Spatial position. Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) utilizes thisinterdependence to suppress clutter and get perfect main-lobe and side-lobe cluttersuppression. But STAP is too complex to be realized, so many STAP reduced-rankmethods have been proposed, i.e. space dimension is reduced rank to∑and△, timedimension is reduced to 1DT or 3DT.In section one, analyzes the echo characteristics of airborne radar in detail,summarizes the main methods of airborne radar clutter suppression and analyzes theircharacteristics. In section two, introduce the application on airborne fire control radar.In section three, introduce the application on airborne phased array radar.