SURFACE CLUTTER

RADAR EQUATION

WHAT IS CLUTTER??
CLUTTER MAY BE DEFINED AS ANY
UNWANTED RADAR ECHO.
This clutter may be unwanted echoes
from land ,sea ,birds , rain ,buildings
and any other atmospheric
phenomena.

WHY IS CLUTTER
UNDESIRED??
Clutter is generally distributed in spatial extent
i.e., it is usually much larger in physical size
than the resolution cell of the radar.
If the clutter is intense and extensive ,it can
limit the sensitivity the radar and interfere with
the radar range performance.
In such circumstances , the optimum radar
waveform and receiver design can be quite
than when receiver noise alone is dominant
effect.

Is it always undesired??
For example , let the transmitted pulse be
reflected by a storm cloud .
This reflected signal may be a clutter for
us ,but for a radar meteorologist who has to
predict the weather in order to measure the
rainfall .
This backscatter echo may degrade the
performance of the radar.
The area of interest in one application may
be a clutter in other application.

TYPES OF CLUTTER
POINT CLUTTER: The echoes from small
objects like birds , poles ,buildings etc
comes under point clutter
SURFACE CLUTTER: The echoes from land
or the sea comes under surface clutter.
VOLUME CLUTTER : The echoes from rain
or any other atmospheric phenomena
comes under volume clutter.

 Due to the distributed nature of the back

scattering from such clutter is generally given in
terms of a radar cross section density rather
than the radar cross section.
For surface clutter a cross section per unit area
is defined as

0 = c/Ac
where 0 is spoken as sigma zero

c is the radar cross section from the

area Ac.
From volume distributed clutter a cross
section per unit volume is defined as

n = c /Vc

SURFACE CLUTTER RADAR

EQUATION

 Conisider the geometry which depicts

a radar illuminating the surface at a
grazing angle . It is assumed that
the width of the area A, is determined
by the azimuth beamwidth b
but that the dimension in the range
ditiiension is determined by the radar
pulse width rather than the elevation
beamwidth.

where P, = transmitter power

G = antenna gain
A, = antenna effective aperture
R = range
a, = clutter cross-section, which
is equal to

 c = 0Ac = 0 R b (ct/2) sec

Where c is the propagation of light.
With this substitution the radar
equation for surface clutter is

 In this equation for Rmax , it is the

first power rather than as the fourth
power in the usual radar equation.
As a result of this there is likely to be
a greater variation the Rmax of a
clutter dominated radar than a noise
dominated radar. For example , if the
target cross section is varied by a
factor of 2 , then the Rmax is varied
by a factor of 2 in the case of a
clutter dominated radar.

 Effect of transmitted power:

The transmitter power does not
appear explicitly.
Increasing the transmitted power will
indeed increase the target signal , but
it will also cause the corresponding
increase in clutter.
Thus there is no net gain in the
detectability of desired targets.
The only demand on the transmitted
power is that it is great enough to
cause the clutter power at the radar
receiver to be large compared to
receiver noise.

 Effect of pulse width:

The narrower the pulse width the
greater the range.
This is just opposite to the case of
conventional radar detection of
targets in noise.
A long pulse is desired when the
radar is limited by noise in order to
increase the signal to noise ratio .
When the clutter dominates noise , a
long pulse decreases the signal to
clutter ratio.

 Consider the case the radar observes

the surface clutter near perpendicular
incidence(grazing angle is pi/2).
This is used in the case of a altimeter.
In this case the clutter power is
inversely proportion to the square of
the range.
But when the grazing angle is low ,
then the clutter power is inversely
proportional to the cube of the range .

THANK
YOU