Effects of objective functions on evaporation duct height estimation from radar sea clutter

A new evaporation duct profile structure is presented by two parameters: evaporation duct height and strength. Two different objective functions are also introduced and analyzed, which show that the objective functions are multi-peak and not sensitive to evaporation duct strength. Based on the new duct model and the two objective functions, the estimations are operated by using differential evolutionary (DE) algorithm. All the estimated results are obtained by 200 Monte Carlo simulations and statistically analyzed. The effects of population size (PS) and clutter to noise ratio (CNR) is also investigated. The analyzed results show that increasing PS can not effectively improve the accuracy of estimations. However, high CNR can obviously improve the accuracy.