Statistical Analysis on Sea Clutter Doppler Properties in X-band for Low Grazing Angles

This paper proposes a coherent statistical analysis of sea clutter recorded by an X-band high range and Doppler resolution airborne radar for maritime surveillance missions at low grazing angle, both horizontal and vertical polarisations. A presentation of the coherent models which are commonly used to simulate synthetic sea clutter samples is given. The following properties are then analysed on our data: the mean Doppler frequency and the Doppler spectrum spread. The main contribution of this study is an analysis of a low grazing angle dataset to either confirm or not Watts model for both horizontal and vertical polarisations. Furthermore, a comparative study on Doppler properties is performed between sea clutter database and models proposed in the state of the art for different wind speeds and both horizontal and vertical polarisations.