Environmental Monitoring Requirements for the ngVLA

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Sridharan, T. K., Mangum, J. G., Butler, B.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Sridharan, T. K.
Mangum, J. G.
Butler, B.
author_facet Sridharan, T. K.
Mangum, J. G.
Butler, B.
contents Measurement of environmental parameters is one of the basic requirements for the proper operation of a telescope. This memo is intended to provide guidance for the measurement accuracy requirements in the context of the ngVLA. It relies on previous work for ALMA (Mangum, 2001) and EVLA (Butler \& Perley, 2008) and a review of the subject by Mangum \& Wallace (2015). The local operational environment can be broadly divided into two categories: electromagnetic and physical. Meteorological parameters (weather) primarily constitute the physical environmental component and radio frequency interference (RFI) is the essential element of the electromagnetic environment. This memo focuses on the weather component and does not address the RFI, safety and physical infrastructure components. Under weather, the relevant topics are (1) the correction to pointing arising from refraction in the atmosphere (2) the different delays in the arrival times of signals at different antennas due to propagation in the atmosphere (3) monitoring weather parameters to provide operations support, e.g. in determining prevalence of precision or normal conditions, dynamic scheduling and the choice of antennas to constitute a sub-array with a given set of characteristics, among others, and (4) archival. Here we restrict ourselves to the first two topics which impact the data obtained and its calibration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14451
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Environmental Monitoring Requirements for the ngVLA
Sridharan, T. K.
Mangum, J. G.
Butler, B.
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Measurement of environmental parameters is one of the basic requirements for the proper operation of a telescope. This memo is intended to provide guidance for the measurement accuracy requirements in the context of the ngVLA. It relies on previous work for ALMA (Mangum, 2001) and EVLA (Butler \& Perley, 2008) and a review of the subject by Mangum \& Wallace (2015). The local operational environment can be broadly divided into two categories: electromagnetic and physical. Meteorological parameters (weather) primarily constitute the physical environmental component and radio frequency interference (RFI) is the essential element of the electromagnetic environment. This memo focuses on the weather component and does not address the RFI, safety and physical infrastructure components. Under weather, the relevant topics are (1) the correction to pointing arising from refraction in the atmosphere (2) the different delays in the arrival times of signals at different antennas due to propagation in the atmosphere (3) monitoring weather parameters to provide operations support, e.g. in determining prevalence of precision or normal conditions, dynamic scheduling and the choice of antennas to constitute a sub-array with a given set of characteristics, among others, and (4) archival. Here we restrict ourselves to the first two topics which impact the data obtained and its calibration.
title Environmental Monitoring Requirements for the ngVLA
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14451