Modelling the ionospheric effects in HF radar long term integration

Marie José Abi Akl (1) , Florent Jangal (1) , Muriel Darces (2) , Marc Hélier (2)

1 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Palaiseau]
2 L2E - Laboratoire d'Electronique et Electromagnétisme

High Frequency radars usually use reflected waves from ionosphere to perform continuous surveillance of very large and far off areas. In the case of long term integration, the ionosphere instability affects the radar image and thus induces poor detection and high probability of false alarm. This problem appears in surveillance issues dealing with slow targets such as vessels. Such an issue is also present in surface wave radar due to the lack of directivity of the transmitting antennas. In this paper, we introduce probabilistic models of the ionosphere effects assuming that only the phase path fluctuation has a meaning in the radar point of view. A first model has been built and compared to a real case. It appears that the deviation in range and Doppler are meaningful. That model will be integrated in the radar processing in order to synthetize highly realistic radar data and estimate the radar parameters in case of turbulent ionosphere (i.e. range-Doppler shifts and uncertainties as well as detection and false alarm probabilities). The obtained results will be presented during the EuCAP 2016 conference.

Mots clés: maritime surveillance; High Frequency radars; ionosphere; probabilistic models; radar processing

Domaines: Electromagnétisme

Marie José Abi Akl, Florent Jangal, Muriel Darces, Marc Hélier. Modelling the ionospheric effects in HF radar long term integration. 10th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP) , Apr 2016, Davos, Switzerland. pp.16037950 ⟨10.1109/EuCAP.2016.7481644⟩. ⟨hal-01384355⟩