Clutter in radar in the unwanted echoes from natural environment.

The basic types of clutter can be summarized as follows: Surface Clutter Echoes from land and sea returns are typical surface clutter. Volume Clutter Weather(rain and snow) or chaff are typical volume clutter.

Point Clutter Birds, windmills and individual tall building TV and water towers are typical point clutter and are not extended in nature. Some times called as discrete clutter. Simple radar equation is not suitable in the presence of Clutter. Grazing angle

Is used to describe the aspect at which clutter is viewed by radar. It is described with respect to the tangent to the surface

Low Grazing angle

= Minimum desirable Signal to clutter ratio = Azimuth Bandwidth = Target Cross Section = Clutter Cross Section per unit area = Grazing Angle At high Grazing angles The radar echoes are mainly due to reflections from clutter that can be represented as number of planer facets oriented so that incident energy is directed back to the radar. The back scatter is large at high grazing angles. At Intermediate Grazing angles Scattering is similar to that from rough surface. At low Grazing angles Here the scattering is influenced by shadowing and multipath propagation. Land Clutter

The radar echo from land depend on the type of the terrain as described by its roughness and dielectric properties. Deserts, forests, vegetation, bare soil, cultivated fields, mountains swamps, cities, roads and lakes are have different scattering characteristics. Radar echo will also depend on moisture content and surface scatterers, snow cover etc Buildings, towers give more intense echo signal because of presence of flat reflecting surfaces and corner reflectors.

Composite of averaged sea clutter data for wind speeds ranging from 10 to 20 knots

Variation of sea clutter with grazing angle. At high grazing angles , above about 45 degrees, sea clutter is independent of polarization and frequency Sea clutter with vertical polarization is larger than horizontal polarization Sea clutter with vertical polarization is approximately independent frequency At low grazing angles sea clutter with horizontal polarization decreases with decrease in frequency this is due to interference effect at low angles.

Except at grazing angles near normal incidence the value of wind speed.

increases with increase in

The back scatter is quite low with wind speeds less than about 5Knots,increase rapidly with speeds from about 5 to 20Knots and increases less rapidly at higher speeds. The energy back scattered from the sea depend on the direction of the wind relative to the radar antenna beam. It is higher when radar beam looks into the wind than when looking down word or cross wind. Horizontal polarization is more sensitive to wind direction than vertical polarization.