TABLE OF CONTENTS It is well known that the amplitude statistics of sea and land clutter deviate from the Rayleigh distribution for short pulses, narrow beam-widths, and low grazing angles. The tails of the distribution extend further from the mean value than would be expected from a large number of random scatterers. It is not difficult to visualize the resolution of ocean waves, since the individual waves often have a spatial period of over 200 ft ( ? = 0.4 ?s). This is important in high-resolution or high-pulse compression ratio radar systems where a threshold detector is set at some arbitrary value above the mean value of the receiver noise or clutter. Numerous descriptions of spiky clutter have been reported, especially for horizontal polarization sea return. Partly because of the difficulty of recording sea clutter echoes from short-pulse radars, it is difficult to confirm a specific power distribution function for short sea clutter echoes. The early measurements with an 8-ns, X-band, 0.9 beamwidth radar reported by Conlon [135] and Myers [496] of NRL suggest a log-normal distribution. This distribution, which was introduced for certain targets (satellites, birds, etc.), appears as a gaussian distribution when ? 0 in decibels is plotted on probability paper. The ratio of the standard deviation to the mean value of ? 0 is one parameter of interest since it is equal to unity for the Rayleigh distribution. Conlon's data show that value to be between 1.5 and...
