I. Introduction
Analysis of the detection performance of maritime surveillance radars requires a good model of the sea clutter returns. The K distribution is a well established model for sea clutter which is formed by compounding a negative exponential distribution for the speckle intensity with a gamma distribution for the clutter power [1]. The K distribution often does not match the tail of the clutter distribution very well, so another component is introduced in the KA [2] and KK [3] models. Recent work has shown that the Pareto distribution is able to fit the observed clutter distribution, including the tail, without introducing another component [4], [5], [6]. The Pareto distribution can be formulated as a compound model with a negative exponential distribution for the speckle intensity and an inverse gamma distribution for the clutter power.