LoSiTo

The LOFAR simulation tool

LoSiTo is a Python package that can be used to produce simulated LOFAR visibilities with a variety of corruptions and effects.

It includes:

• Time- and direction-dependent ionospheric effects (TEC and rotation measure)
• Beam effects
• Station-based delay effects (clock and polarization misalignment)
• Realistic noise

Furthermore, LoSiTo features the simulation of LOFAR2.0 simultaneous LBA-HBA observations. For a detailed description of the models for the systematic effects implemented in LoSiTo and its application to simulate LOFAR 2.0 observations, see the paper Edler, de Gasperin, Rafferty (2021).

The full documentation can be found at the LoSiTo webpage.

Software requirements:

• casacore and python-casacore
• DP3
• LoSoTo
• RMextract
• LSMTool
• Python 3.7+ (including scipy, numpy, and astropy)

Installation

The recommended way to install LoSiTo is to download it from github and install with:

git clone https://github.com/darafferty/losito.git
cd losito
pip install .

Directory Structure

LoSiTo contains the following sub-directories:

• bin the losito main program and a number of scripts for your convenience
• examples example parsets
• losito the losito Python files, operations and data.

LoSiTo was developed by:

• David Rafferty
• Henrik Edler
• Francesco de Gasperin

with contributed code from:

• Maaijke Mevius
• Peter Dorman