Novel Characterization and Measurement of Radar Ground Clutter for Modeling and Simulation

Efficient and cost-effective technologies are required to support radar ground clutter characterizations for weapon system simulations. Current methods for clutter measurement are often limited in diversity of look angle, frequency band, and spatial location. In order to address such limitations, SimTech proposes to develop laboratory techniques with scale model technologies to generate representative full-scale clutter statistics for real-world scenes. Clutter scenes will emulate basic first order backscatter statistics as well as second order spatial statistics. Phase I efforts will demonstrate this capability with a well known terrain environment. Measurements data will be collected on physical scale models and validated against airborne SAR measurements during Phase I research.