Coherent sea-clutter cancelation is shown to be an effective method for the exposure of ships with HF OTH (high-frequency over-the-horizon) sky wave radar. A sinusoidal model has been successfully used to approximate and subtract the first-order Bragg peaks, which spread and mask slow targets when using Fourier Doppler processing on short dwells (fewer than 10 s). (Short dwells are required for aircraft surveillance over the vast HF radar coverage area.) The new clutter canceling algorithm has been successfully applied to both synthetic and real OTH data from the U.S. Navy's Relocatable Over-the-Horizon radar (ROTHR) (AN/TPS-71), and results are presented. ¿ 1998 American Geophysical Union