Concerning the PDRA (pulse doppler radar altimeter) designing and evaluation, owing to that the specifications of PDRA should be adaptively fixed according to the ETR (earth terrain return), and that in certain stages of product evaluation of PDRA which means the designations of PDRA are successful or not, the usage of ETR are indispensable, so the terrain return from spherical earth is critically important. A complete analytic derivation of the antenna shot section model of PDRA and the bright section model constrained by pulse emitted from antenna are given. Furthermore, the doppler effect mode and the earth terrain RCF (radar crossing factor) model are constructively analyzed. Then, the computing methodology on PDRA, which are used to compute the scattering power, scattering doppler spectrum, and the scattering signal, is studied. Besides, in order to check the correctness and efficiency of the algorithm, computing examples of ETR (earth terrain return) under the supposing premises are furnished. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that the models and algorithm are rational, the computational precise is satisfactory, the cost of computing time is low.
