Bistatic High-Frequency Coherent Radar Imaging of Ionospheric Disturbances

High-frequency (HF) communications links are drastically affected by ionospheric disturbances. Experiments that artificially disturb the ionosphere while imaging that disturbance with sufficient resolution for comparison with relevant modeling tools could help improve those models. This work describes a proposed bistatic HF phased array radar system that will image ionospheric disturbances created by the Highfrequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Gakona, Alaska. The proposed array will use the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) system in Kodiak, Alaska as a transmitter of opportunity. This work presents a novel approach that incorporates ionospheric ray bending effects into the evaluation of coherent radar imaging (CRI) algorithms. We accomplish this via two-dimensional full-wave Fourier domain simulations that generate artificial data for each receive antenna, which is then fed into the CRI algorithms under evaluation. We compare these results with the traditional straight-ray simulated data approach. Initial results suggest that incorporating ray bending into the imaging algorithm used to process the data will be critical to properly localizing targets and that advanced imaging or deconvolution techniques may provide resolution improvements over standard imaging techniques even with more cluttered and complicated data sets.