Stuart of Adelaide University

Abstract: Not for the first time, HF radar is enjoying a resurgence of interest and investment. In large part this is due to the deteriorating geopolitical environment and the particular capabilities that HF radar delivers, but it also reflects a growing awareness of the fragility and limitations of some other ISR technologies.

There is a tendency for a successful technology that satisfies its user community to acquire a degree of inertia that impedes innovation, and a case can be made that this has afflicted HF radar in some implementations. Typically, HF skywave clients are concerned with primary radar missions aimed at establishing and maintaining a Recognized Air Picture (RAP) or Recognized Surface Picture (RSP) showing the respective air and surface traffic movements within the radar coverage area; there is relatively little interest in pursuing more ambitious missions, especially where that would interrupt and degrade performance in the primary tasks. Moreover, subject to a few constraints, modern skywave radars can deliver aircraft and ship detection products with a high availability, in the range 90 – 99 %, say, at rapid tempo, whereas some ‘niche’ radar products demand considerable time and resources but offer far lower chances of success.

However, this lower ‘duty-cycle’ is no reason to ignore new or under-exploited radar capabilities, especially where the information they can yield enhances performance of the basic missions in subtle but crucial ways, as well as opening new and often unexpected windows on events transpiring in the radar coverage. In this talk I shall demonstrate the feasibility of a number of prospective HF radar missions that could have important practical applications, showing how they are rendered achievable through the development of more sophisticated models of the underlying physics. 

Biography:

Dr. Stuart J. Anderson received the B.Sc. (1st Class Honors) and Ph.D. (atomic physics) degrees in physics from the University of Western Australia in 1968 and 1972 respectively. As a student, he worked on the early Australian HF radar program in 1965-67. In 1974, he was invited to join the team being assembled in the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organization to develop the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) system, where he assumed responsibility for designing and implementing the ocean surveillance and remote sensing capabilities. Between 1982 and 1987 he conducted many pioneering experiments with the Jindalee radar, establishing the world’s first operational OTHR ship detection capability and developing a daily oceanic wind mapping service which provided data to the Bureau of Meteorology from 1983 until 1995. In the 1980’s he spent a year at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, working as a visiting scientist on the US Navy Relocatable OTH Radar (ROTHR), and another year in the UK working on a related joint UK-US project. In 1998-99 he spent some months on attachment to the French OTHR project Nostradamus and subsequently made extended visits to OTHR research groups in Russia and China.  From 1995 he led the DSTO research programs in HF surface wave radar and in microwave radar polarimetry, in addition to continuing to extend the capabilities of skywave OTH radar through the development of advanced signal processing techniques and novel physics. Stuart retired from DSTO in 2014, taking up a position as Adjunct Professor in the Physics Department at the University of Adelaide, along with an appointment as Honorary Professor at University College London. Stuart was the recipient of the 1992 Australian Minister of Defense Science Award for Research Achievement, along with several other prizes and awards. In 2005 the Université Rennes I, France, awarded him the degree doctor honoris causa for his contributions to radar science. He has published over 350 journal papers, conference papers, books, book chapters, and reports in these fields, and is the principal author of the chapter on OTH radar in the authoritative Radar Handbook.

Email:

Address:College of Science , Adelaide University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, 5005