Airborne Radar Signal Processing: Fundamentals of Doppler Detection, Clutter Suppression, and System Design

How do you detect a moving target when the clutter reflected from the ground can be 60 decibels stronger than the signal you are trying to find?

That is one of the defining challenges of airborne radar, where aircraft motion, Doppler shifts, range ambiguities, and powerful ground reflections complicate the task of detecting and tracking targets. Solving these problems requires more than memorizing equations. It requires understanding how radar signals behave, how processing techniques work together, and how engineering decisions affect system performance.

Airborne Radar Signal Processing: Fundamentals of Doppler Detection, Clutter Suppression, and System Design brings the essential principles and techniques together in one structured volume, connecting radar fundamentals to advanced processing methods and system-level design decisions.

From the pulsed-radar block diagram to space-time adaptive processing, synthetic aperture radar imaging, and target tracking, this book develops the airborne radar signal-processing chain step by step. Equations are derived from stated assumptions, symbols are defined where they appear, and technical explanations emphasize units, practical interpretation, and the limitations of engineering models.

Inside, you will explore how to:

• Estimate radar detection range using the radar range equation, system losses, and fluctuating-target statistics.
• Select waveforms and pulse repetition frequencies while accounting for range and Doppler ambiguities.
• Analyze mainlobe clutter, sidelobe clutter, and the altitude line, and understand moving-target-indication and pulse-Doppler processing.
• Establish detection thresholds using cell-averaging and ordered-statistic constant false alarm rate (CFAR) techniques.
• Understand space-time adaptive processing, adaptive weights, and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) loss.
• Interpret range-Doppler maps, understand synthetic aperture radar imaging, and follow target tracking through gating, data association, and recursive filtering.

Core coverage includes the radar range equation, noise figure, complex baseband representation, radar data cubes, matched filtering, pulse compression, radar cross section, clutter modelling, Doppler processing, platform-motion compensation, antenna arrays, beamforming, monopulse angle estimation, and radar system design.

The book also explores airborne radar applications such as air-to-air search and tracking, ground moving target indication, and mapping. Throughout, attention to assumptions, common errors, and practical limitations helps readers understand not only how individual techniques work, but also how they fit into the broader radar system.

Written for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in electrical, electronic, and aerospace engineering, as well as practicing radar, avionics, and systems engineers, this textbook offers a unified foundation for understanding airborne radar processing and the engineering trade-offs behind system design.

Move beyond isolated radar formulas. Build a connected understanding of the signal-processing techniques that make airborne target detection, clutter suppression, imaging, and tracking possible.