Thursday, December 27, 2012

1212.6101 (Balthasar T. Indermuehle et al.)

Water Vapour Radiometers for the Australia Telescope Compact Array    [PDF]

Balthasar T. Indermuehle, Michael G. Burton, Jonathan Crofts
We have developed Water Vapour Radiometers (WVRs) for the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) that are capable of determining path fluctuations by virtue of measuring small temperature fluctuations in the atmosphere using the 22.2 GHz water vapour line for each of the six antennae. By measuring the line of sight variations of the water vapour, the induced path excess and thus the phase delay can be estimated and corrections can then be applied during data reduction. This reduces decorrelation of the source signal. We demonstrate how this recovers the telescope's efficiency and image quality as well as how this improves the telescope's ability to use longer baselines at higher frequencies, thereby resulting in higher spatial resolution. A description of the WVR hardware design, their calibration and water vapour retrieval mechanism is given.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.6101

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