The invention relates to an airborne early warning radar sea surface maneuvering ship target adaptive tracking method comprising the following steps: 1, converting measurement trace point data detected by an airborne early warning radar to a tracking coordinate system; 2, transmitting the processing result of the previous smooth interval to the current smooth interval; 3, according to a processing result of a previous smooth interval, solving posterior distribution of a measurement noise covariance matrix by using variational Bayesian learning; 4, solving the prediction distribution of the measurement noise covariance matrix in the step 3 in the current smooth interval by adopting a blanking model; 5, carrying out forward filtering processing by using the measurement trace point data output in the step 1 and the processing result in the step 4 and using an interactive multi-model algorithm; step 6, carrying out reverse smoothing processing by adopting an RTS-IMM algorithm according to the processing results of the step 4 and the step 5; and 7, solving a fusion estimation value through moment matching processing according to a processing result of the step 6, and outputting a track.