Climatic data analysis for input to ShipIR

Abstract

A key input to any thermal infrared signature model is the environment, more specifically the model inputs specific to the thermal infrared background model. This paper describes a new method of analysing the climatic data for input to ShipIR. Historical hourly data from a stationary marine buoy are used to select a small number of data points (N=100) to adequately cover the range of statistics (CDF, PDF) displayed by the original data set (S=46,072). The method uses a coarse bin (1/3) to subdivide the variable space (35=243 bins), and a single-point ranking system to select individual points so that uniform coverage (1/N = 0.01) is obtained for each variable. The selected data points are used in Vaitekunas and Kim (2013) to demonstrate how the new methodology is used to provide a more rigorous and comprehensive analysis of platform IR susceptibility based on the statistics of IR detection. ？ 2013 SPIE.