Baseline Dependent Averaging in Radio Interferometry

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the applicability and benefits of baseline dependent averaging (BDA) in modern radio interferometers and in particular the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). We demonstrate that BDA does not affect the information content of the data other than a well-defined decorrelation loss for which closed form expressions are readily available. We verify these theoretical findings using simulations. We therefore conclude that BDA can be used reliably in modern radio interferometry allowing a reduction of visibility data volume (and hence processing costs for handling visibility data) by more than 80%.

arXiv comment12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018

References in corpus (4)

• The Murchison Widefield Array: the Square Kilometre Array Precursor at low radio frequencies
• Real-Time Calibration of the Murchison Widefield Array
• The Expanded Very Large Array
• Using baseline-dependent window functions for data compression and field-of-interest shaping in radio interferometry

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• Fast algorithms to approximate the position-dependent point spread function responses in radio interferometric wide-field imaging
• A Decentralized Framework for Radio-interferometric Image Reconstruction
• vis-r: Quick radial profile modelling for radio interferometric visibilities
• Fine-grained Distributed Averaging for Large-scale Radio Interferometric Measurement Sets
• A Real Time Processing System for Big Data in Astronomy: Applications to HERA
• Lossless compression of simulated radio interferometric visibilities
• CHILES VII: Deep Imaging for the CHILES project, a SKA prototype