Estimation of sea clutter inherent Doppler spectrum from shipborne S-band radar sea echo*

Abstract

Measurement of shipborne radar sea echo is instrumental in collecting the sea clutter data in open sea areas. However, the ship movement would introduce an extra Doppler component into the spectrum of the sea clutter, so the sea clutter inherent spectrum must be estimated prior to investigating the sea clutter Doppler characteristics from the shipborne radar sea echo. In this paper we show some results about a shipborne sea clutter measurement experiment that was conducted in the South China Sea in a period between 2017 and 2018; abundant clutter data have been collected by using a shipborne S-band clutter measurement radar. To obtain the sea clutter inherent Doppler spectrum from these data, an estimation method, based on the mapping relationship between the shipborne clutter spectrum and the inherent clutter spectrum, is proposed. This method is validated by shipborne clutter data sets under the same measuring conditions except for the ship speed. Using this method, the characteristics of the Doppler spectrum lineshapes in the South China Sea are calculated and analyzed according to different sea states, wave directions, and radar resolutions, which can be instrumental in designing the radar target detection algorithms.