Software Tool for Statistical Radar Signature Description of Small Sea Targets

Limiting the damage to Navy ships from small-craft attacks in littoral environments will require reliable detection, discrimination, and identification of the potential threats among a number of targets against a complex and dynamic sea surface. The ability of shipboard or shore-emplaced radar systems to perform these functions is a critical issue that can only partly be judged on the basis of traditional measures of noise and clutter, or by empirical rules developed from testing at sea. It would be best to supplement these approaches with direct simulations representative of the full range of target environments, for which the electromagnetic response can be calculated over a broad band of illuminating frequencies. Statistics could then be derived from repeated sampling of relevant environmental conditions, target motions, and target geometries. Based on HyPerComps recent success in the development of high order accurate time-domain (HDphysics) and frequency domain (ParMax) electromagnetic codes that have been demonstrated for solving large-scale EM problems of a thousand wavelength or more in size, this proposed effort from HyPerComp will use full wave solvers for the entire sea state/boat problem with no need for hybridization.