AOFlagger Wiki

RFI detector and quality analysis for astronomical radio observations

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July 2020 update: The AOFlagger repository is being moved to Gitlab. This site and the repository will soon be deprecated.

New code location: https://gitlab.com/aroffringa/aoflagger
Documentation: https://aoflagger.readthedocs.io/

The AOFlagger is a flagger framework that implements several methods to deal with radio-frequency interference or RFI.

I have spent a lot of time on this package, and I believe it is the best available flagger. If you use this package for scientific work, please acknowledge my work and cite the following paper that introduced the latest algorithm:

A morphological algorithm for improving radio-frequency interference detection, Offringa et al. 2012, A&A, 539, A95. This paper introduces the scale-invariant rank operator, a morphological operator to find samples with a high chance of RFI contamination. (bibtex)

For the MWA, when using the AOFlagger inside the Cotter software, one can cite this paper instead:

The Low-Frequency Environment of the Murchison Widefield Array: Radio-Frequency Interference Analysis and Mitigation, Offringa et al., 2015, PASA, 32, e008. (bibtex)

Latest release:

AOFlagger 2.15 was released on 20 February 2020. Refer to the changelog and the installation instructions for more information. The latest source code is available for download by clicking the 'Code' tab.

Manual pages - Index

Introduction
Installation instructions
rfigui, tool for analyzing RFI, data and for strategy parameter tweaking;
- General information about rfigui
- Editing a strategy
- Scripted plotting: Using rfigui and aoqplot to make plots from the command line or a script.
Programs and tools
- aoflagger: executes a given flagging strategy on a full measurement set;
- aoqplot: for fast visualization of statistics, to assert the generic data quality;
- other tools: the less frequently used tools.
Programming with AOFlagger
Frequency-asked questions

Other sources of information:

Debian AOFlagger tracker
The LOFAR cookbook for LOFAR-specific info about running the flagger.
C++ Application Programming Interface of the AOFlagger library.

The official webpage of the AOFlagger is http://aoflagger.sourceforge.net/.

Contact information

In case of questions, suggestions or feedback, please mail me. My e-mail address is <mylastname>@gmail.com, and my last name is offringa.

Acknowledgments

This package has gained tremandously from advice from my late PhD supervisor Ger de Bruyn. Andy Biggs and Ger van Diepen have provided several fixes and hints. Ole Streicher does a great job at package aoflagger for Debian. The RFI tools make heavy use of Casacore, thus their authors have been instrumental in creating the flagger. I would also like to thank all people that have provided test data or filed bug reports.

Project Admins:

André Offringa