A LOFAR RFI detection pipeline and its first results

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated RFI detection pipeline for LOFAR, demonstrating high accuracy and efficiency, significantly reducing data loss due to radio frequency interference in radio astronomy observations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new fast and accurate automated RFI flagging pipeline using the SumThreshold method, tailored for LOFAR data.

Findings

The pipeline achieves high accuracy in RFI detection.

It operates with low computational cost.

Only a few percent of data is lost to RFI with LOFAR.

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.