No evidence of stable distributions in radar clutter

Abstract

The alpha-stable distribution is a theoretical model for impulsive noise that currently enjoys wide success. In this paper, we test its applicability to high resolution radars that are capable of resolving fine structure of the sea surface. The received sea clutter signal by such systems is not well modeled by a Gaussian process, and we expected that stable distributions may provide better description of noise statistics than the conventional non-Gaussian models such as the K-distribution. However, in the important for radar low probability of false alarm region, we found that the K-distribution fits better the sea-clutter amplitude statistics than the alpha-stable distribution. In the application considered, we explain this failure of the stable model based on the analytical stable noise modeling.