Ionospheric Decontamination for HF Hybrid Sky-Surface Wave Radar on a Shipborne Platform

This letter describes a method of correcting ionospheric frequency modulation for a high-frequency hybrid sky-surface wave radar mounted on a shipborne platform. In the proposed method, azimuth-dependent sea clutter signals are first decomposed into monocomponent signals based on distinguishable differences in their directions of incidence. Afterward, based on the decomposed monocomponent signals, the statistical mean of the time derivatives of the signal phases, weighted by the signal amplitudes, is used to estimate the ionospheric frequency modulation. Finally, the estimated result is applied to the received data to compensate for the ionospheric contamination. Numerical results on simulated data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.