  Evanescent random fields arise as a component of the 2-D Wold decomposition
of homogenous random fields. Besides their theoretical importance, evanescent
random fields have a number of practical applications, such as in modeling the
observed signal in the space time adaptive processing (STAP) of airborne radar
data. In this paper we derive an expression for the rank of the low-rank
covariance matrix of a finite dimension sample from an evanescent random field.
It is shown that the rank of this covariance matrix is completely determined by
the evanescent field spectral support parameters, alone. Thus, the problem of
estimating the rank lends itself to a solution that avoids the need to estimate
the rank from the sample covariance matrix. We show that this result can be
immediately applied to considerably simplify the estimation of the rank of the
interference covariance matrix in the STAP problem.
