Statistical Analysis of Bistatic and Monostatic Sea Clutter

In this work, we analyze the sea clutter data collected simultaneously by the bistatic and monostatic nodes of a S-band netted radar system. The analyzed radar system is the NetRad, developed by the University College London (UCL) and the datasets were collected with four different out-of-plane geometries. The aim of the analysis is to compare statistically the behavior of the bistatic and monostatic sea clutter for different geometries. In particular, we focus on the sea spikes, whose presence increases the probability of false alarm of the radar detector. The statistical analysis is carried out by comparing the empirical distribution of sea clutter data with some known heavy-tailed distributions and by studying the behavior of three statistical parameters, the kurtosis the Weibull and K+Noise shape parameter. An algorithm that separates the sea spikes from the Bragg background is implemented, in order to study in-depth the sea spikes statistics. To this aim, we examine the empirical distribution of the spike duration and of the interval between two subsequent spikes. The results of our analyses show that spikiness is higher for low values of the bistatic angle and that bistatic data are generally less spiky than monostatic ones only for horizontal polarization.