The Technology Challenge Facing EW Today

When you're going to give the first talk in the morning on the third day of a three-day conference, and the banquet, followed by the traditional partying, takes place the night before, you take unusual measures to get and keep the attention of the audience (such as it is). If the serious reader will skim through the various attempts at humor, he will find some thoughts that I believe are important and that might be of interest to him. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not in any way purport to represent those of The MITRE Corporation or the Department of Defense.     

Carbon monoxide spatial gradients over source regions as observed by SCIAMACHY: A case study for the United Kingdom

Carbon monoxide (CO) is an important air pollutant whose emissions and atmospheric concentrations need to be monitored. The measurements of the SCIAMACHY instrument on ENVISAT are sensitive to CO concentration changes at all atmospheric altitude levels including the boundary layer. The SCIAMACHY CO measurements therefore contain information on CO emissions. Until now no studies have been published where the SCIAMACHY CO measurements have been used to quantify CO emissions by applying, for example, inverse modelling approaches. Here we report about a step in this direction. We have analysed three years of CO columns to investigate if spatial gradients resulting from United Kingdom (UK) CO emissions can be observed from space. The UK is an interesting target area because the UK is a relatively well isolated CO source region. On the other hand, the UK is not the easiest target as its emissions are only moderate and because the surrounding water has low reflectivity in the 2.3 μm spectral region used for CO retrieval. We determined horizontal CO gradients from seasonally and yearly averaged CO during 2003–2005 over the UK taking into account daily wind fields. We show that the measured CO longitudinal (downwind) gradients have the expected order of magnitude. The estimated 2σ error of the gradients depends on time period and applied filtering criteria (e.g., land only, cloud free) and is typically 10–20% of the total column. The gradients are barely statistically significant within the 2σ error margin. This is mainly because of the relatively high noise of the SCIAMACHY CO measurements in combination with a quite low number of measurements (∼100) mainly due to cloud cover.     

Coarse quantization for data compression in coherent location systems

When emitter location systems measure time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) and differential Doppler (DD) by coherently cross-correlating the signal pairs, data compression techniques are needed to facilitate data transfer of one of the signals to the receiving site of the other signal. Two block-adaptive quantization schemes are analyzed here to determine their impact on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the quantized signal as well as on the post-correlation SNR. Comparisons are made between two approaches: quantization of the real/imaginary (R/I) components or the magnitude/phase (M/P) components. For the M/P approach, a rule is derived for optimally allocating the bits between the magnitude and phase. The M/P approach provides better post-quantization/precorrelation SNR for most signals; however, when the SNR of the signal not being quantized is small, the post-correlation SNR can be largely unaffected by the quantization. In that case, there is little difference between R/I and M/P, even under the most favorable scenario for M/P.     

The standoff observation of enemy ground forces from Project Peekto JointSTARS-A prolusion

The author describes the evolution of JointSTARS. In particular he outlines three series of events that led to JointSTARS-an Army, an Air Force and a Joint one. Amongst the topics discussed are: Mohawk SLAR system; ALARM/SOTAS; MLRS3/MARS; and Assault Breaker and Pave Mover     

Distortion Generated in Angle-Modulation Systems by Phased Arrays

The case of linear, uniformly weighted phased arrays is examined via time and frequency domain analyses. Bounds that must be placed on array length, modulation frequency, modulation index ?, and scan angle relationships if excessive distortion is to be avoided in wideband angle-modulated communication systems are established. Distortion is shown to consist of odd harmonic terms. It is also shown that, for one class of equivalent RF signals, phased arrays produce approximately three times as much distortion in frequency-modulation (FM) systems as in phase-modulation (PM) systems. Graphs of distortion plotted as functions of signal and array parameters show that, for practical array sizes, distortion is a monotonically increasing function of the product of L and sin ? where L is the length of the array expressed in modulation wavelengths ?m and ? is the scan angle. In PM systems, distortion also increases monotonically with the modulation index ?. Plots of distortion versus L sin ? show that even relatively small arrays can produce intolerable distortion levels in wideband systems; e.g., an FM system having ? = 3,L = 0.35?m, and ? = 60 degrees exhibits approximately 20 percent distortion.