Modeling and simulation of sea surface radar observations

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology to model and simulate the reflectivity measured by radar observing a maritime environment. The simulation principle consists of reproducing the acquisition of a Real Aperture Radar (RAR) moving along its axis. Pulse after pulse, high range resolution profiles are successively computed by summing the contribution of backscatters comprised in the radar footprint. The scatterer contributions are calculated from typical statistical distribution estimation. The simulation output, called raw data, is the concatenation of time profiles (short time) successively obtained for each radar pulse (long time). A SAR algorithm is then applied in order to form a high resolution image. The generation of the sea surface is achieved by a multi-scale model. This approach takes into account phenomena at different scales (from long wave to small objects), all in interaction in a hydrodynamic environment. It is thus possible to focus locally on contributions considered as more significant. To improve the processing time some contributions can also be retrieved from Look-Up Tables. Hence, our method performs a realistic simulation of electromagnetic interactions in a maritime environment.