High-Fidelity Inhomogeneous Ground Clutter Simulation of Airborne Phased Array PD Radar Aided by Digital Elevation Model and Digital Land Classification Data

Abstract

This paper presents a high-fidelity inhomogeneous ground clutter simulation method for airborne phased array Pulse Doppler (PD) radar aided by a digital elevation model (DEM) and digital land classification data (DLCD). The method starts by extracting the basic geographic information of the Earth’s surface scattering points from the DEM data, then reads the Earth’s surface classification codes of Earth’s surface scattering points according to the DLCD. After determining the landform types, different backscattering coefficient models are selected to calculate the backscattering coefficient of each Earth surface scattering point. Finally, the high-fidelity inhomogeneous ground clutter simulation of airborne phased array PD radar is realized based on the Ward model. The simulation results show that the classifications of landform types obtained by the proposed method are more abundant, and the ground clutter simulated by different backscattering coefficient models is more real and effective.