ALMA pipeline heuristics

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array/Atacama Compact Array (ALMA/ACA) Pipeline Heuristics system is being developed to automatically reduce data taken with the standard observing modes such as single fields, mosaics or on-the-fly maps. The goal is to make ALMA user-friendly to astronomers who are not experts in radio interferometry. The Pipeline Heuristics must capture the expert knowledge required to provide data products that can be used without further processing. The Pipeline Heuristics system is being developed as a set of Python scripts using as the data processing engines the Common Astronomy Software Applications (CASA[PY]) libraries and the ATNF Spectral Analysis Package (ASAP). The interferometry heuristics scripts currently provide an end-to-end process for the single field mode comprising flagging, initial calibration, re-flagging, recalibration, and imaging of the target data. A Java browser provides user-friendly access to the heuristics results. The initial single-dish heuristics scripts implement automatic spectral line detection, baseline fitting and image gridding. The resulting data cubes are analyzed to detect source emission spectrally and spatially in order to calculate signal-to-noise ratios for comparison against the science goals specified by the observer.