Preliminary analysis on the noise characteristics of MWISP data
Abstract Noise is a significant part within a millimeter-wave molecular line datacube. Analyzing the noise improves our understanding of noise characteristics, and further contributes to scientific discoveries. We measure the noise level of a single datacube from MWISP and perform statistical analyses. We identified major factors which increase the noise level of a single datacube, including bad channels, edge effects, baseline distortion and line contamination. Cleaning algorithms are applied to remove or reduce these noise components. As a result, we obtained the cleaned datacube in which noise follows a positively skewed normal distribution. We further analyzed the noise structure distribution of a 3D mosaicked datacube in the range l = 40 ⋅ ° 7 to 43 ⋅ ° 3 and b = − 2 ⋅ ° 3 to 0 ⋅ ° 3 and found that noise in the final mosaicked datacube is mainly characterized by noise fluctuation among the cells.