Modeling of Heavy Tailed Sea Clutter Based on the Generalized Central Limit Theory

Abstract

For high-resolution radars operating at low grazing angles, sea clutter always exhibits an impulse behavior with heavy tailed statistical property. Presented is a statistical model for spiky sea clutter based on the generalized central limit theory (CLT). Within the compound Gaussian structure, the CLT is adopted in the modeling of the Bragg scattering speckle component, while the generalized CLT is introduced to describe the contribution of spiky scattering component, which has potential in describing the impulse nature of the underlying mean level because of its algebraic (inverse power) tails. Validation results with S- and X-band measured sea clutter data indicate that the proposed model can improve the fitting accuracy of spiky sea clutter effectively, especially in the tail region.