This paper aims to study the effects of charged sand/dust atmosphere on the performances of microwave quantum illumination (QI) radar. Based on Mie particle scattering theory, using a Monte Carlo method for simulating the physical process which photon is scattered multiple times by discrete random distributed particles, the specific attenuation (dB/km) of microwave propagating in sand/dust atmosphere are analyzed under the conditions of varying atmospheric visibility and sand/dust particles with different charged quantities. It is indicated that the specific attenuation obtained by multiple scattering is smaller than those obtained based on Mie theory, for microwave propagating in charged sand/dust atmosphere. The smaller the atmospheric visibility, the greater the difference, while the difference decreases gradually as the atmospheric visibility increases. Then, it is more reasonable to consider multiple scattering attenuation at lower atmospheric visibility. When sand/dust particle is charged, the specific attenuation is increased, however, this increase is not linear. According to quantum illumination radar theory, a beam splitter-based optical link model is used to simulate the sand/dust atmospheric channel. The effects of charged sand/dust atmosphere with different visibility on the detection error probability, signal-to-noise ratio, and maximum detection range for microwave quantum illumination radar are studied by using quantum radar equation and quantum detection error probability theory. The performances of QI and classical two mode noise (TMN) radar are compared and analyzed. These results show that the performances of quantum illumination radar are improved with increasing sand/dust atmospheric visibility. When sand/dust particle is charged, the performances for QI radar are degraded due to attenuation increase. The change in the performances is nonlinear as the change in sand/dust carrying charge quantity. Increasing the signal frequency can enhance the performance of quantum illumination radar when visibility is high, but when visibility is low, the gain from frequency increase is outweighed by the performance degradation caused by increased attenuation, making it inadvisable to raise the frequency in such cases. The comparison with classical radar reveals that QI radar performs better under the condition of lower atmospheric visibility and lower average photon emission, but this advantage diminishes as the number of photons increases. In a word, these results show that the performances of QI radar are more significant at lower atmospheric visibility. Under higher visibility conditions, the QI system SNR can be improved by increasing frequency. The maximum detection range of the QI radar is significantly better than the classical TMN radar.
