Detection, classification and correction of ionospheric distortion in HF skywave (OTH) radar systems

Abstract

HF skywave radar performance is often severely degraded by nonstationarity of the ionospheric propagation channel, so recognition and correction of distortion and contamination is a vital part of the radar signal processing sequence. As a consequence of the variety of physical mechanisms responsible for such degradation, a corresponding number of model-based correction algorithms have been developed and refined on test data. We consider the issue of model fidelity requirements and how one should concatenate individual algorithms to construct an optimal global correction procedure.