LOFAR Initial Calibration (LINC) Pipeline¶
LINC is a pipeline to correct for various instrumental and ionospheric effects in both LOFAR HBA and LOFAR LBA observations.
It includes:
removal of clock offsets between core and remote stations (using clock-TEC separation)
correction of the polarization alignment between XX and YY
robust time-independent bandpass correction
ionospheric RM corrections with RMextract
removal of the element beam
advanced flagging and interpolation of bad data
mitigation of broad-band RFI and bad stations
direction-independent phase correction of the target, using a global sky model from TGSS ADR or the new Global Sky Model (GSM)
detailed diagnostics
It will prepare your data to allow you continuing the processing with any direction-dependent calibration software, like Rapthor, factor or killMS.
Note
If you intend to use LINC for the processing of long baselines (international stations) the user is referred to the LOFAR-VLBI documentation, since the compatibility of both pipelines may be limited to certain version or releases. It is recommended to stick to the instructions therein.
Note: The current master branch version of LINC includes also a workflow for processing target fields with the LOFAR LBA. This workflow is EXPERIMENTAL and not fully functional yet. Please consider using LiLF for your processing.
Introduction¶
Obtaining LINC¶
Setting Up and Running LINC¶
The LINC Pipelines¶
- Pipeline overview
- Calibrator pipeline
- Target pipeline
- Prepare target, incl. “demixing” (
prep
) - Calibration against a global skymodel (
gsmcal
) - Self-calibration workflow for HBA observations (
selfcal_target_hba
) - Self-calibration workflow for LBA observations (
selfcal_target_lba
) - Finalizing the LINC output (
finalize
) - Further diagnostics
- User-defined parameter configuration
- Prepare target, incl. “demixing” (