The effect of temporal correlation with K and KK-distributed sea-clutter

Sea-clutter has been studied for many years over a range of sea conditions, polarisations and geometries. The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Ingara airborne X-band fully polarimetric radar has been used to collect data in the medium grazing angle region to evaluate models of the observed sea phenomenology and determine their impact on target detection. The focus of this work is the temporal correlation that may be present in either the target and / or clutter components of the received pulses. If this correlation is not accounted for in a radar model, the required signal to interference ratio (SIR) for a given probability of detection (P
_d
) will be incorrect by several dB, resulting in over-estimated performance. This paper describes a model for the temporal correlation of medium grazing angle X-band sea-clutter and quantifies the detection performance for Rayleigh fluctuating targets with both K and KK distributed sea-clutter.