Foliage Penetration Phenomena

Abstract

The development of foliage penetration (FOPEN) radar had a major resurgence in the early 1990s for both military and geoscience applications. A series of data collections was carried out starting in 1990 as a risk reduction for the development of a more reliable FOPEN synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. Several government laboratories including NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Sweden's Defence Research Establishment (FOA), US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and the US Naval Air Development Center (NADC) initiated these collections for both scientific and system technology objectives. A combination of instrumentation collection platforms and airborne brassboard radars were used to obtain data on surface clutter, foliage scattering losses, and the ability to detect objects and terrain features in forested regions. However, it was deemed to be very important that accurate instrumentation and calibration targets be included in the test to characterize the target and clutter phenomena toward the development of operational and commercial radar systems. To this end, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored MIT Lincoln Laboratory to set up and maintain the scientific and analytic standards. These capabilities would provide the community with a reliable understanding of these measurements' influence on new systems applications.