Ground Clutter Censoring Algorithm for Airborne Weather Radar Employing DEM

A ground clutter rejection method based on echo amplitude and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is proposed, which can be used to censor the clutter when airborne weather radar operates in weather mode. For ground clutter suppression of airborne weather radar in weather mode, it proposes ground clutter rejection method base on echo amplitude and Digital Elevation Model. The amplitude information is used to segment the radar initial echo. And then the visibility analysis method based on DEM is used to judge the segmentation edge does touch ground or not. According to the analysis results，these segmentation datum may be only weather, only ground clutter and both of them joined which need to be divided into sub segmentation to identify the boundary of them. The ranges with clutter are edited and rejected, so the suppression is implemented directly in time domain. In virtue of the proposed algorithm, the ranges where the clutter exists can be computed accurately using radar parameters and DEM. The validity of the method is verified by using the measured data. The proposed method only deals with the echo signal above minimum detectable signal. It can greatly reduce the computation.