Joint mitigation of RF interference and ground clutter in an airborne surveillance radar system

Ground Moving Target Indication is a key feature of modern airborne surveillance radar systems. In operational scenarios, the radar echos from moving targets will have to compete not only with ground clutter, but also with (both intentional and inadvertent) man-made radio frequency interference. If the radar system possesses several receive channels, noise jamming can be mitigated by adaptive beamforming, and ground clutter can be suppressed using space-time adaptive processing. Based on simulation and the results presented in "Savy, Bürger, Richardson, Medley, The Relative Merits of Pre-/Post-Doppler STAP", this paper discusses algorithms for the combined mitigation of noise jamming and ground clutter, as well as possible training strategies for the estimation of the corresponding adaptive weights.