Differences in the motion of different parts of a target cause the echo signal to contain specific Doppler modulation information, i.e., the micro-Doppler (m-D) effect. This phenomenon provides an effective way to detect targets in marine environments. In this study, based on the establishment of the micromotion model of a rotating surveillance radar and analysis of the m-D frequency, the geometrical optics and physical optics (GO-PO) method and the time-frequency analysis technique are used to obtain the radar cross section (RCS) and m-D signature of a ship with a shipborne radar at different observation angles. The ship, as the main component of the echo, is associated with the main energy. Finding the optimum angle to observe the shipborne radar is of great importance. The results show that the m-D signatures of the shipborne radar are not clear when the elevation angle is greater than 60° but are clear when the elevation angle is less than 55°. Moreover, some motion parameters can be extracted from the m-D signature, such as the period of the ship micromotion. The rotation speed of the shipborne radar can be obtained and is consistent with the set speed. This can help identify and track the key parts of a ship with local motion.

A reliable and efficient way is proposed for investigating the electromagnetic (EM) scattering from a large marine environment containing multiple vessels. To enhance the computational efficiency, an improved method is proposed based on the facet-based simplified small slope approximation (FBS-SSA) to calculate the scattering field from the sea surface. In addition, the overall sea surface is decomposed into non-coupled and coupled regions. Then, this paper uses a combined method based on the geometrical optics/physics optical (GO/PO) method and the physical theory of diffraction (PTD) method for studying the scattering field from the targets and the coupling scattering field between the targets and the sea surface in the coupled region. Numerical results show that the proposed method has advantages of higher efficiency and good accuracy compared with the original EM model and it can be applied to simulate SAR images of a marine environment with ships.

The trimaran is an advanced ship with high hydrodynamic performance, but the study of its electromagnetic characteristics and Doppler spectrum is insufficient. This study presents a new procedure for evaluating the scattering echo and Doppler spectrum of a trimaran in a time-varying ocean environment. First, based on the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations, the interpolation wave-making method (IWMM) is proposed for the prediction of the six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) motion of the trimaran. The method takes into account the viscous effect of the flow field and the complexity of wave motion, which applies to the seakeeping prediction of high-speed trimaran under different sea states. Second, an accelerated geometrical optics and physical optics algorithm using the light source function (GO-PO/LSF) is proposed, which uses the light source function to realize the visibility judgment of surfaces and greatly reduces the computation time. Then, the influence of different motion conditions on the backscattering echo of the composite scene is demonstrated by the capillary wave modification facet scattering model (CWMFSM) and GO-PO/LSF. Finally, the Doppler spectrum characteristics of the trimaran are presented by the standard spectrum estimation method, which provides a reference for radar detection and identification of ships in the microwave band.

A full-polarized facet based scattering model (FPFSM) for investigating the electromagnetic (EM) scattering by two-dimensional electrically large sea surfaces with high efficiency at high microwave bands is proposed. For this method, the scattering field over a large sea facet in a diffuse scattering region is numerically deduced according to the Bragg scattering mechanism. In regard to near specular directions, a novel approach is proposed to calculate the scattered field from a sea surface based on the second order small slope approximation (SSA-II), which saves computer memory considerably and is able to analyze the EM scattering by electrically large sea surfaces. The feasibility of this method in evaluating the radar returns from the sea surface is proved by comparing the normalized radar cross sections (NRCS) and the Doppler spectrum with the SSA-II. Then NRCS results in monostatic and bistatic configurations under different polarization states, scattering angles and wind speeds are analyzed as well as the Doppler spectrum at Ka-band. Numerical results show that the FPFSM is a reliable and efficient method to analyze the full-polarized scattering characteristics from electrically large sea surface within a wide frequency range.

With the realization of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) completion, GNSS reflectometry (GNSS-R) has become increasingly popular due to the advantages of global coverage and the availability of multiple sources in terms of earth remote sensing. This paper analyzes the Beidou navigation satellite system (BDS) signal reflection detection of multiple satellites and multiple moving targets under multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems and proposes a series of methods to suppress multiple Doppler phase influences and improve the range detection property. The simulation results show the restored target peaks, which match the RCS data more accurately, with the GNSS-R Doppler phase influence removed, which proves the proposed method can improve target recognition and detection resolution performance.

The combination of the fact-based asymptotic method (FBAM) and the geometrical optics and physical optics (GO/PO) hybrid method is an effective way to analyze the electromagnetic (EM) scattering from electrically large ship targets in a marine environment because it takes the multiple scattering of the ship targets into consideration as well as the coupling scattering field between the targets and the sea surface. However, regarding an electrically large marine scene that contains a large target, the occlusion judgement process for calculating the multiple scattering field and the coupling field makes it inefficient. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a physical mechanism-based improved method to reduce the invalid occlusion judgment between different patches on the composite ship–ocean scene, and this operation enhances the computational efficiency significantly. With the proposed method, radar cross section (RCS) results of different targets and composite ship–ocean scenes were calculated and compared with the original FBAM and GO/PO method. Numerical results showed that the proposed method had higher efficiency compared with the original method with the same good accuracy. In addition, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of a composite ship–ocean scene with different radar parameters and sea conditions were simulated with the proposed method for detection purpose. Finally, the proposed method was used to analyze the EM scattering characteristic of a marine environment with multiple ships.