A LOFAR RFI detection pipeline and its first results

Abstract

Radio astronomy is entering a new era with new and future radio observatories such as the Low Frequency Array and the Square Kilometer Array. We describe in detail an automated flagging pipeline and evaluate its performance. With only a fraction of the computational cost of correlation and its use of the previously introduced SumThreshold method, it is found to be both fast and unrivalled in its high accuracy. The LOFAR radio environment is analysed with the help of this pipeline. The high time and spectral resolution of LOFAR have resulted in an observatory where only a few percent of the data is lost due to RFI.

Accepted for publication in Proc. RFI2010

References in corpus (6)

• Post-correlation radio frequency interference classification methods
• Foreground simulations for the LOFAR - Epoch of Reionization Experiment
• Removing radio interference from contaminated astronomical spectra using an independent reference signal and closure relations
• Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation at the WSRT
• RFI detection by automated feature extraction and statistical analysis
• Data reduction strategy of the Effelsberg-Bonn HI Survey (EBHIS)

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Comparing Foreground Removal Techniques for Recovery of the LOFAR-EoR 21cm Power Spectrum
• Post-correlation filtering techniques for off-axis source and RFI removal
• SERPent: Automated reduction and RFI-mitigation software for e-MERLIN
• HIDE & SEEK: End-to-End Packages to Simulate and Process Radio Survey Data
• Progress with the LOFAR Imaging Pipeline
• RFI Flagging Implications for Short-Duration Transients
• Cosmological 21cm experiments: Searching for a needle in a haystack