Abstract
In the target localization of skywave over-the-horizon radar (OTHR), the error of the ionospheric parameters is one main error source. To reduce the error of ionospheric parameters, a method using both the information of reference sources (e.g., terrain features, ADS-B) in ground coordinates and the corresponding OTHR measurements is proposed to estimate the ionospheric parameters. Describing the ionospheric electron density profile by the quasi-parabolic model, the estimation of the ionospheric parameters is formulated as an inverse problem, and is solved by a Markov chain Monte Carlo method due to the complicated ray path equations. Simulation results show that, comparing with using the a prior value of the ionospheric parameters, using the estimated ionospheric parameters based on four airliners in OTHR coordinate registration process, the ground range RMSE of interested targets is reduced from 2.86 to 1.13 km and the corresponding improvement ratio is up to 60.39%. This illustrates that the proposed method using reference sources is able to significantly improve the accuracy of target localization.
Highlights
Operating in the high frequency band, skywave over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) leverages ionospheric reflection to detect and localize moving targets in the areas beyond horizon and plays a vital role in both military missions and civil applications [1,2]
In this paper, considering the full ionospheric model, we provide a novel method for OTHR Coordinate registration (CR) by inferring the ionospheric parameters using the reference sources and their measurements received by OTHR
We proposed a novel method for OTHR CR through using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to estimate the ionospheric parameters with reference sources
Summary
Operating in the high frequency band, skywave over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) leverages ionospheric reflection to detect and localize moving targets in the areas beyond horizon and plays a vital role in both military missions and civil applications [1,2]. Few works belonging to the second category of OTHR CR approaches have considered full ionospheric models, of which parameters mainly refer to the spatial distribution of electron density. In [19], the joint multiple target ground track estimation and data association was considered, where CR is determined by ray tracing with given plasma frequency profile described by the vector consisting of the critical frequencies, heights, and thicknesses of ionospheric layers. A problem may arise that the ionospheric parameters provided by FMS are not accurate or consistent with the true ionospheric parameters which are supposed to be used in OTHR target tracking This is because, on the one hand, the deployment of FMS equipment is restricted to available and limited areas. In this paper, considering the full ionospheric model, we provide a novel method for OTHR CR by inferring the ionospheric parameters using the reference sources and their measurements received by OTHR.
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