In the marine environment, shore-based radars play an important role in military surveillance and sensing. Sea clutter is one of the main factors affecting the performance of shore-based radar. Affected by marine environmental factors and radar parameters, the fluctuation law of sea clutter amplitude is very complicated. In the process of training a sea clutter amplitude prediction model, the traditional method updates the model parameters according to the current input data and the parameters in the current model, and cannot utilize the historical information of sea clutter amplitude. It is only possible to learn the short-term variation characteristics of the sea clutter. In order to learn the long-term variation law of sea clutter, a sea clutter prediction system based on the long short-term memory neural network is proposed. Based on sea clutter data collected by IPIX radar, UHF-band radar and S-band radar, the experimental results show that the mean square error of this prediction system is smaller than the traditional prediction methods. The sea clutter suppression signal is extracted by comparing the predicted sea clutter data with the original sea clutter data. The results show that the proposed sea clutter prediction system has a good effect on sea clutter suppression.

Tropospheric duct is an anomalous atmospheric phenomenon over the sea surface that seriously affects the normal operation and performance evaluation of electromagnetic communication equipment at sea. Therefore, achieving precise sensing of tropospheric duct is of profound significance for the propagation of electromagnetic signals. The approach of inverting atmospheric refractivity from easily measurable radar sea clutter is also known as the refractivity from clutter (RFC) technique. However, inversion precision of the conventional RFC technique is low in the low-altitude evaporation duct environment. Due to the weak attenuation of the over-the-horizon target signal as it passes through the tropospheric duct, its strength is much stronger than that of sea clutter. Therefore, this study proposes a new method for the joint inversion of evaporation duct height (EDH) based on sea clutter and target echo by combining deep learning. By testing the inversion performance and noise immunity of the new joint inversion method, the experimental results show that the mean error RMSE and MAE of the new method proposed in this paper are reduced by 41.2% and 40.3%, respectively, compared with the conventional method in the EDH range from 0 to 40 m. In particular, the RMSE and MAE in the EDH range from 0 to 16.7 m are reduced by 54.2% and 56.4%, respectively, compared with the conventional method. It shows that the target signal is more sensitive to the lower evaporation duct, which obviously enhances the inversion precision of the lower evaporation duct and has effectively improved the weak practicality of the conventional RFC technique.

The evaporation duct is a prevalent atmospheric structure in the marine lower troposphere with significant regional nonuniformity. This structure can trap radio waves inside its layer and enable them to propagate over the horizon with less loss. Therefore, accurately predicting the over-the-horizon propagation loss (OHPL) is important for optimizing the performance of radio-electronic systems. Considering the OHPL characteristics in nonuniform evaporation ducts, this article establishes an OHPL prediction model by incorporating prior information into the long short-term memory (LSTM)–transformer structure (IPILT–OHPL). The combination of the LSTM network and transformer is used to construct the LSTM–transformer, aimed at leveraging their respective strengths to extract important features of OHPL effectively. In addition, to improve the prediction accuracy, this article incorporates the evaporation duct height as an environmental prior information into the LSTM–transformer. Finally, this article comprehensively evaluates IPILT–OHPL model performance in different application scenarios. The evaluation results show that the established model not only has high prediction accuracy but also strong generalization ability, which provides a new method for efficiently predicting the OHPL in nonuniform evaporation ducts.

The analysis of marine environmental parameters plays a significant role in various aspects, including sea surface target detection, the monitoring of the marine ecological environment, marine meteorology and disaster forecasting, and the monitoring of internal waves in the ocean. In particular, for sea surface target detection, the accurate and high-resolution input of marine environmental parameters is crucial for multi-scale sea surface modeling and the prediction of sea clutter characteristics. In this paper, based on the low-resolution wind speed, significant wave height, and wave period data provided by ECMWF for the surrounding seas of China (specified latitude and longitude range), a deep learning model based on a residual structure is proposed. By introducing an attention module, the model effectively addresses the poor modeling performance of traditional methods like nearest neighbor interpolation and linear interpolation at the edge positions in the image. Experimental results demonstrate that with the proposed approach, when the spatial resolution of wind speed increases from 0.5° to 0.25°, the results achieve a mean square error (MSE) of 0.713, a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 49.598, and a structural similarity index measure (SSIM) of 0.981. When the spatial resolution of the significant wave height increases from 1° to 0.5°, the results achieve a MSE of 1.319, a PSNR of 46.928, and an SSIM of 0.957. When the spatial resolution of the wave period increases from 1° to 0.5°, the results achieve a MSE of 2.299, a PSNR of 44.515, and an SSIM of 0.940. The proposed method can generate high-resolution marine environmental parameter data for the surrounding seas of China at any given moment, providing data support for subsequent sea surface modeling and for the prediction of sea clutter characteristics.

A tropospheric duct (TD) is an anomalous atmospheric refraction structure in marine environments that seriously interferes with the propagation path and range of electromagnetic (EM) waves, resulting in serious influence on the normal operation of radar. Since the propagation loss (PL) can reflect the propagation characteristics of EM waves inside the duct layer, it is important to obtain an accurate cognition of the PL of EM waves in marine TDs. However, the PL is strongly non−linear with propagation range due to the trapped propagation effect inside duct layer, which makes accurate prediction of PL more difficult. To resolve this problem, a novel multiscale decomposition prediction method (VMD−PSO−LSTM) based on the long short−term memory (LSTM) network, variational mode decomposition (VMD) method and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed in this study. Firstly, VMD is used to decompose PL into several smooth subsequences with different frequency scales. Then, a LSTM−based model for each subsequence is built to predict the corresponding subsequence. In addition, PSO is used to optimize the hyperparameters of each LSTM prediction model. Finally, the predicted subsequences are reconstructed to obtain the final PL prediction results. The performance of the VMD−PSO−LSTM method is verified by combining the measured PL. The minimum RMSE and MAE indicators for the VMD−PSO−PSTM method are 0.368 and 0.276, respectively. The percentage improvement of prediction performance compared to other prediction methods can reach at most 72.46 and 77.61% in RMSE and MAE, respectively, showing that the VMD−PSO−LSTM method has the advantages of high accuracy and outperforms other comparison methods.

This study numerically investigates electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation in spatially-varying evaporation ducts over rough sea surfaces. Conventional two-dimensional (2D) models assume homogeneous refractive index distribution along the cross-range dimension in a single propagation plane, limiting their ability to capture the 3D spatial heterogeneities present in real-world scenarios. Under significant horizontal gradient variations in evaporation ducts, EM wave propagation effects across the cross-range dimension become significant. We investigate an advanced 3D parabolic equation (3DPE) framework that synergistically integrates anisotropic refractive profiles with sea-surface roughness characterization. An even-odd splitting Fourier transform algorithm enables efficient computational analysis of EM wave propagation across azimuthal planes. Quantitative analysis reveals that the 3DPE framework delivers over 40% performance improvement compared to the 2D model. This approach significantly enhances predictive accuracy for over-the-horizon radar assessments in maritime environments, providing crucial support for optimizing next-generation communication systems.