Estimation of Atmospheric Duct Structure Using Radar Sea Clutter

Abstract

Abstract Retrieving atmospheric refractivity profiles from the sea surface backscattered radar clutter is known as the refractivity-from-clutter (RFC) technique. Because the relationship between refractivity and radar sea clutter is clearly nonlinear and ill posed, it is difficult to get analytical solutions according to current theories. Previous works treat this problem as a model parameter estimation issue and some optimization algorithms are selected to get approximate solutions. Two main factors that limit the accuracy of the estimation are that 1) the refractive environments are described by using some idealized refractivity parameter models that cannot describe the exact information of the refractivity profile, and 2) accurate modeling of the sea surface radar cross section (RCS) is very difficult. Rather than estimating a few model parameters, this paper puts forward possibilities of using the variational adjoint approach to jointly retrieve the every-height refractivity values and sea surface RCS using radar clutter data. The derivation of the adjoint model is accomplished by an analytical transformation of the parabolic equation (PE) in the continuous domain. Numerical simulations including range-independent and range-dependent RCS cases are presented to demonstrate the ability of this method for RFC estimations. Making use of the refractivity retrievals, propagation loss predictions are also presented.