The LOFAR Solar Data Center(LSDC) in Potsdam

Frank BreitlingLeibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP)

Solar Key Science Project

GLOW Annual Meeting 2012June 18-19

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 1

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 22

Overview

• Motivation from solar observations• LSDC as front end of the Solar Imaging Pipeline• LSDC web interface• Problems with LOFAR solar data• Todo list, Summary, Outlook

Objectives of solar observations -study of solar activity

monitoring of solar radio bursts images of short integration time (≤1s) poor uv coverage (no aperture synthesis) flood of images (43200 in 12 h) for every subband / frequency automatic processing required

(LOFAR Solar Imaging Pipeline) archive with interface required

(LOFAR Solar Data Center)

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 3

The LOFARSolar Imaging Pipeline

Archiving:html.obslsdcsync

Imaging: casaimg

Calibration: bbs

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 4

Measure-ment Set SB001

Measure-ment Set SB002

Measure-ment SetSB003

Web Page

SB001

Web Page

SB002

Web Page

SB003

Blue GeneCorrelator

Data

Front end / Web interface

developed by the Solar KSP / F. Breitling

The LSDC web interface at http://lsdc.aip.de/

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 5

Observation L31779 –Overview of all SBs / Frequencies

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 6

Observation L31779 –SB005 / 125MHz

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 7

Bursts disturb calibrators/calibration

• The commissioning observation showed, that solar radio bursts easily outshine the Virgo A calibrator => spoiling the calibration

• Manually we could transfer the solutions from a quiet period to the burst period and calibrate it

But we still need to implement an automatic solution Currently many bursts will not appear in the Solar Data Center

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 8

Sun needs strong calibrators

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 9

• So far only Virgo A (1100 Jy) was strong enough for calibration, 3C273 (79Jy) and 3C279 (~25Jy) were not!

• It is possible that for certain times no calibrator for the Sun is found We need to study this systematically in high- and low-band

Other important things to do

• Implementations– Calibration + imaging synthesis of moving targets (LOFAR 2.0)– Clean algorithm to remove beam artifacts– Fix CASA performance issue, maybe by parallelization/partition– Absolute flux scale, polarization images, …

• Add– Spectra from LOFAR imaging data– High resolution spectra from single station BF observations– Interplanetary scintillation data from R. Fallows et al.– Measurement Sets and FITS files

• Administration– Migrate the LSDC prototype to its new server at the AIP– Setup backup with the LOFAR Long Term Archive– Process the data from the first 48h campaign this fall

• Documentation: - Cookbook, - 6th Solar KSP Workshop,– Solar pipeline meeting @ ASTRON (July 9-13)

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 10

Summary

+ The LSDC has opened and can be accessed through the internet at http://lsdc.aip.de

+ Many parts of the Solar Imaging Pipeline are already working+ All commissioning data has been processes +transferred to the LSDC+ New solar observations can be processed automatically and will be

transferred there as well

- Some important features of the Solar Imaging Pipeline still missing- No guaranty for successful calibration of all new data

(calibrator problem) Support is always welcome with the development of

– software modules for solar pipeline– Calibration strategies, - data analysis, etc.

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 11

Outlook

• Generate those movies automatically• for all observations and frequencies• with removed beam and absolute flux• available at the LSDC web site• with corresponding images, spectra and

other related data products

Thanks for your attention!

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 12

Solar vs. StandardImaging Pipeline

GLOW 2012 - Bielefeld, June 19 The LOFAR Solar Data Center (LSDC) 13

• the Solar IP is an extension to the LOFAR Standard IP• for imaging the Sun• developed by the Solar KSP

Components• OLAP: Online Application Processing• DP3: Default Pre-Processing Pipeline• BBS: BlackBoard Selfcal• CImager

Sun calibration+simulation

parset

Solar coordinatesconverter

Sun skymodel

• cimager• CASA

Solar Pipecontrol

programs

DP3parset

CASA script

cimagerparset

Solar Data Center

Observation statistics

Othertools