Coherent radar performance in sea clutter

Coherent detectors are typically designed on the assumption that the covariance matrix or power spectrum of the clutter in a cell-under-test can be estimated accurately from surrounding data. However, the time-varying and range-varying nature of sea clutter Doppler spectra means this may be difficult to achieve. The performance of coherent detectors working in both the frequency domain and time domain is assessed using measured data from the Australian Ingara X-band airborne radar. To further explore the sensitivity of the detection performance, an evolving Doppler spectrum model is then used to simulate sea-clutter. The detection performance is first directly compared with the measured data before being extrapolated to other clutter conditions.