A new method to compensate clutter range dependence for forward looking airborne radars

The clutter direction-Doppler curves are not aligned on the near range bins for forward looking airborne radar. As a result, the performance of clutter suppression by Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) degrades greatly because of the clutter range dependence. To deal with this problem, a new compensated method is proposed in this paper. The method rebuilds the clutter covariance matrix based on spatial high resolution Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) spectrum, and then finds a matrix to transform the covariance matrix of short-range gate to the referred far-range gate. The method can compensate the clutter range dependence well. The simulation results show validity of the method.