RADAR TARGET VISIBILITY OVER THE SEA: DEVELOPMENT OF PREDICTION TECHNIQUES AT THE IRE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF UKRAINE

Abstract
The paper is a historic review of the developments in a major field of research at the IRE of Ukraine – namely, prediction of radar target visibility over the sea. The results of early field campaigns in the Black and Baltic Sea areas are presented which permitted relating the radar visibility of targets on the sea surface to meteorological conditions along the radio propagation path. The expeditions of IRE researchers that were held in 1950s cast light, among other things, on the origin of ‘radio troughs’, or sharp drops in the level of the radio signal owing to a screening effect of elevated layers of inversion. The latter are known to substantially influence the operation of radio communication, radar and navigation systems. The results obtained over inland seas formed a basis for the development of methods to estimate radar visibility and compose radio climatic maps. The extended programs adopted later for studying radio propagation over the World Ocean (1970s and 1980s) allowed creating a databank of radio meteorological parameters which proved useful for the design and operation of radar systems. A prediction technique was developed for estimating the radar visibility of surface and aerial targets, and an applied software packet created which allows signal level computations based on meteorological data.
KEY WORDS: radar visibility; radio wave propagation; tropospheric ducting

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