Correction of Refracted Propagation Effects for Airborne Radar Tracking

This paper is devoted to the study of mathematical models for the refracted propagation effects and their correction for airborne radar tracking. Given an atmosphere of varying refractive index, the path of the EM radiation is curved and this causes bias errors on range and elevation radar measurements. First, we model these atmospheric errors and then we generate the corrupted measures. Second, we process the synthetic data to evaluate the bias of range and elevation errors. Finally, an algorithm, based on the Kalman Filter (KF) is proposed in order to remove such errors and improve tracking performance. Both theoretical and numerical results are described.