An Interferometric Approach to Cross-Track Clutter Detection in Two-Channel VHF Radar Sounders

Abstract

Surface cross-track clutter can corrupt both earth and planetary radar sounder (RS) observations preventing definitive interpretation of subsurface features, which are often of primary interest to geologists and planetary scientists. This clutter is usually identified either by manual or automatic techniques that require ancillary information about the topography of the surface, or by using multichannel RS systems with arrays of antennas. However, topographic information is not always available and multichannel systems are generally too massive and costly to mount on satellites for the planetary exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to clutter discrimination that is independent of ancillary information and limits the hardware complexity of the RS system. This approach uses a two-channel RS and exploits cross-channel interferometric phase differences to discriminate the clutter. Our approach includes three main steps: 1) manual feature extraction and theoretical phase-difference estimation; 2) RS interferogram formation; and 3) comparison of theoretical and real phase difference distributions. The proposed method was validated on RS data acquired in Greenland and provides a proof of concept for the surface clutter discrimination using RS data.