Theory and Measurements of Angle-of-Arrival of Diffraction-Limited Electromagnetic Wave Beams in the Turbulent Atmosphere

摘要

Improvements in radar tracking performance based on the use of interferometric and distributed aperture radar systems, together with the need for command-guided weapons for cost reduction, have placed more stringent requirements on radar angular accuracy. The result of this upgraded accuracy requirement is that fluctuations in angle-of-arrival (AOA) due to small-scale atmospheric turbulence become significant in the error budgets of command- guided weapons systems. In this paper we present a theory of AOA variations based on the incorporation of diffraction-limited Gaussian beam propagation into a geometrical optics formulation of AOA. Measurements of AOA are compared to this theory with good agreement for this type of experiment.