Investigation Of Range Profiles From A Simplified Ship On Rough Sea Surface And Its Multipath Imaging Mechanisms

The range profiles of a two-dimension (2 D) perfect electric conductor (PEC) ship on a wind-driven rough sea surface are derived by performing an inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) on the wide band backscattered field. The rough sea surface is assuming to be a PEC surface. The back scattered field is computed based on EM numerical simulation when the frequencies are sampled between 100 MHz and 700 MHz. Considering the strong coupling interactions between the ship and sea, the complicated multipath effect to the range profile characteristics is fully analyzed based on the multipath imaging mechanisms. The coupling mechanisms could be explained by means of ray theory prediction and numerical extraction of the coupling currents. The comparison of the range profile locations between ray theory prediction and surface current simulation is implemented and analyzed in this paper. Finally, the influence of different sea states on the radar target signatures has been examined and discussed.