Wind-Blown Clutter Mitigation to Improve Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Moving Target Indicator (MTI) Performance

For stationary ground moving target indication (GMTI) radars, targets are generally isolated from clutter under the assumption that the clutter background is non-moving and therefore exists only at zero Doppler while moving targets will appear at non-zero Doppler shifts. In reality the background clutter will often have a non-zero bandwidth due to the presence of wind-blown foliage such as trees and shrubs and thus occupy Doppler filters other than the zero-Doppler filter. This results in degradation of the detection performance for slow moving targets resulting in minimum detectable velocity (MDV) performance of a radar system that varies as wind conditions change. For example, when the wind is blowing the clutter will occupy additional Doppler filters resulting in the obscuration of some moving targets that would otherwise be detectable under calmer wind conditions. The main goal of the proposed research is to develop techniques to enhance system performance by estimating clutter Doppler spread directly from the radar data in "real-time" and apply that knowledge in detection and tracking filters to reduce false alarms while maintaining system sensitivity. It is anticipated that the algorithms developed under the proposed effort will improve system performance by applying real-time characterization of the clutter Doppler spread due to wind-blown clutter during a given coherent processing interval (CPI).