Abstract: As a fundamental issue of array signal processing, direction of arrival estimation is widely applied in contemporary communication. Conventional direction of arrival estimation schemes are primarily developed under Gaussian noise assumptions. However, when the received signal contains alpha-stable distribution impulsive noise, second order statistics will become unbounded and the conventional direction of arrival estimation schemes will become ineffective. To overcome this defect, a modified correntropy operator——deviation from the median based correntropy is first defined and its boundedness property is proved to ensure its validity in the alpha-stable distribution noise environment. Based on the modified correntropy operator and MUSIC algorithm, a novel direction of arrival estimation method is proposed. The proposed scheme not only requires no prior knowledge of background noise but also shows robustness to the impulsiveness of noise. Comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations verify the superior performance of the proposed method under many impulsive noise scenario, even when there are few snapshots and the impulsiveness of noise is strong.