Journal article
Characterization of the ionosphere above the Murchison Radio Observatory using the Murchison Widefield Array
CH Jordan, S Murray, CM Trott, RB Wayth, DA Mitchell, M Rahimi, B Pindor, P Procopio, J Morgan
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2017
Abstract
We detail new techniques for analysing ionospheric activity, using Epoch of Reionization data sets obtained with the MurchisonWidefield Array, calibrated by the 'real-time system' (RTS). Using the high spatial- and temporal-resolution information of the ionosphere provided by the RTS calibration solutions over 19 nights of observing, we find four distinct types of ionospheric activity, and have developed a metric to provide an 'at a glance' value for data quality under differing ionospheric conditions. For each ionospheric type, we analyse variations of this metric as we reduce the number of pierce points, revealing that a modest number of pierce points is required to identify the intensity ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
CHJ thanks Paul Hancock for providing data containing ionospheric activity early in the pipeline development, and discussing techniques on identifying ionospheric structure. Computation was aided with the PYTHON libraries NUMPY (Walt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011), SCIPY (Jones et al. 2001) and ASTROPY (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013). In addition, was used MATPLOTLIB to generate the figures presented in this publication (Hunter 2007). The Centre for All-SkyAstrophysics (CAASTRO) is an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, funded by grant CE110001020. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. CMT is supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researcher funding scheme (project number DE140100316). This work was supported by resources provided by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre with funding from the Australian Government and the Government of Western Australia. We acknowledge the iVEC Petabyte Data Store, the Initiative in Innovative Computing and the CUDA Center for Excellence sponsored by NVIDIA at Harvard University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a Joint Venture of Curtin University and The University of Western Australia, funded by the Western Australian State government.