Impact of Strong Scintillation on Space Based Radar Design. Noncoherent Detection

摘要

Electromagnetic signals which propagate through strongly disturbed regions of the ionosphere can experience scattering which can cause appreciable amplitude, phase and angle-of-arrival fluctuations. This report considers the performance of a space based radar (SBR) that must operate through a highly disturbed propagation environment such as might occur during a barium release or after a high altitude nuclear detonation. A brief summary of the propagation channel characteristics is given in terms of quantities that are important to SBR design issues. Previous results for coherent detection performance are summarized and new results are given showing the effect of noncoherent integration on target detection performance. Both coherent and noncoherent detection performance can be seriously affected in a scintillation environment if scintillation is not considered in the radar design.