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