Ionospheric Decontamination and Sea Clutter Suppression for HF Skywave Radars

Abstract

In this paper, a cascaded correction and suppression method of reducing ionospheric phase path contamination and sea clutter to enable detection of targets travelling at speeds near the Bragg Doppler is addressed. The Hankel rank reduction (HRR) technique based on singular value decomposition (SVD) has been used to estimate the ionospheric phase distortion and suppress the sea clutter. Simulation results show that such a technique is helpful for the worse conditions when the target masking effect happens even after ionospheric phase decontamination. Finally, an attempt to combine another phase decontamination algorithm based on the piecewise polynomial phase modeling with the clutter cancellation stage for faster phase fluctuation is discussed briefly and some results are given.