An approach to suppress short-range clutter for non-side looking airborne radar

When the Airborne Early Warning (AEW) radar transmits medial or high Pulse Repetitive Frequency (PRF) signal, the range ambiguity occurs. The clutter of short-range clutter has serious range dependence problem for non-Side Looking Airborne Radar (non-SLAR). As a result, the clutter plus noise covariance matrix can not be estimated correctly, and the performance of clutter suppression obtained by Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) degrades greatly. The uniform linear array has not elevation degrees; therefore, the short-range clutter can not be suppressed directly. A short-range clutter suppression method is proposed. The method first estimate the elevation angles of the am-biguous short-range gate, then eliminates short-range clutter by space time interpolation and adds moving target protection in the procedure. This method can suppress the short-range clutter well. Simulation results show the validity of the method.