Target-Ocean Scene Simulator for the Prediction of Electromagnetic Scattering Effects of Sea on the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of Small Boats in Littor

The objective of this proposal is to demonstrate the feasibility of generating realistic ocean-like ground planes for the RCS prediction of small vessels in both shallow and deepwater environments. Although significant progress has been made in furthering the state-of-the-art in electromagnetic modeling for air and ground environments, predicting target signatures at sea has lagged, in part, due to the problem of modeling the stochastic nature of the ocean surface. This has left analysts predicting the signatures of sea based targets, particularly in cases where shallow look down angles aren’t applicable, with the very limited and highly unsatisfactory options of using ground planes with flat or Gaussian based distributions for the modeling of sea surfaces. This proposal outlines an approach to leveraging existing technology under development at Angle Incorporated to model the ocean surface using a highly tessellated grid with a height field perturbed in real time using power spectral density models such as those defined by Pierson-Moskowitz or Hasselman. Moreover, it proposes integrating this technology into an application that also incorporates a physics engine contained in its WaveLore simulator products to model real-time vessel dynamics. With the addition of a CAD geometry import-export capability the real-world dynamic relationship between the ocean surface and the vessel orientation would be captured, providing a revolutionary improvement in predicting the radar cross section of sea-based target data.