Airborne Distributed Coherent Aperture Radar (ADCAR) is one of the most promising next-generation radars to significantly improve target detection and discrimination abilities.How-ever,time and phase synchronization among unit radars should be done before an ADCAR is intended to cohere on a potential target.To address this problem,a time and phase synchronization technique using clutter observations is proposed in this paper.Clutter returns from different azi-muths and elevations on the surface of the earth are employed to calibrate system uncertainties.Two stages are mainly considered:a scene registration among range-Doppler units from different transmit/receive pairs is performed to enhance the clutter coherence in the first stage,followed by a joint estimation of those synchronization errors in the second stage.To relieve the computa-tional burden,a novel Separable and Sequential Estimation (SSE) method is provided to separate the unknowns at the sacrifice of a range-Doppler unit.Moreover,performance analyses including the clutter coherence ability,estimation lower bound,and signal coherence loss are also performed.Finally,simulation results indicate that ADCAR time and phase synchronization is realized by using our methods.