A hybrid approach on generating correlated sea clutter for maritime radar test

Abstract

Test, measurement and verification of radar are necessary to ensure function according to specification and meet customer requirements. Extensive field tests are often required to test an entire radar system. This is not only expensive, but also requires a great deal of time. To reduce test complexity and cost, simulation techniques are used to recreate real-world conditions in a laboratory environment. Many subsystems can be tested by radar target generators simulating radar echo signals. They usually consider Swerling models, but struggle to simulate clutter, or in particular sea clutter. This paper introduces an approach to generate sea clutter with a state of the art vector signal generator. It shows common approaches modeling sea clutter and introduces a novel approach to combine the statistical models with a physical ocean surface model. This way, time and spatially correlated data that reproduces real-world sea clutter is generated, thus a cheaper, more time efficient way to conduct sea trials is presented.