TABLE OF CONTENTS In the previous chapter we considered the phenomenology of sea clutter and its impact on the operation of microwave radar systems. To exploit this knowledge and improve radar performance, we need to understand the underlying physical mechanisms responsible for these clutter properties, so that they can be modelled realistically. At first sight this might seem, in principle at least, to be a simple matter particularly if use is made of a computer. The fundamental physics of the generation and transmission of microwaves, their interaction with the ocean surface and scattering to the radar receiver is well understood. The ocean and atmosphere have been subject to intensive study for at least a century; the underlying laws of fluid motion have been known for much longer. Can clutter modelling be any more than a matter of assembling these constituent parts and turning the handle?
In practice this optimism turns out to be ill-founded. While the mathematical formulation of the underlying physics of clutter generation has been understood for many years, that period has not seen the development of generally effective techniques for the solution of the equations emerging from this framework. For example, the computation of scattering from extended objects at close to grazing incidence presents problems that have only just begun to be addressed effectively in the last decade, and yet calculations of this kind must lie at the heart of any a priori modelling of sea clutter. Attempts to develop approximate analytical models of scattering by other...
