Probing ionospheric structure using LOFAR data

To obtain high quality images with the Lofar low frequency radio telescope, accurate ionospheric characterization and calibration is essential. The large field of view of LOFAR (several 10s of square degrees) requires good knowledge of the spatial variation of the ionosphere. In this work to probe the ionospheric structure, we first carried out initial calibration on LOFAR data. Afterwards, we extracted ionospheric information from the antenna based calibration solutions.