Policies and Procedures
The policies and procedures given below follow strictly those outlined in version D of the ALMA Operations Plan, approved by the ALMA Board on October 29th 2007.
Observations
The ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) of ESO's Data Management and Operations Division supports the European ALMA users during Phase I and Phase II of observing proposal preparation, as well as with standard data products, standard tools and archive usage. User support will be provided via email and the Web following the same operations model in place for ESO facilities on Paranal.
Data quality assurance and certified data products will be produced by the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) in Chile. ESO will distribute products from the archive copy maintained and operated in Garching. ESO will have staff who are expert in the standard processing pipelines of the observatory and can provide technical data analysis support for these products and the ALMA standard pipelines and packages.
Archiving of the data
The data produced during an ALMA observing run, as well as their calibrations, are stored in the ALMA Archive at ESO. With the ALMA Archive Query Form, users can obtain information on the observations done with ALMA.
All ALMA scientific data are subjected to a proprietary period of one year since the date when they were distributed to the Principal Investigator. After the proprietary period, the data become public and anyone can retrieve them by means of an archive request.
Standard calibration data shall have no proprietary period and will be available to all users from the ALMA archive. Individual PI science observations may require observing mode specific calibration data. These data will be acquired automatically as part of normal science operations. Time used to acquire these data shall be included in the operational overheads charged to the users (as are other mandatory operational tasks, e.g. target acquisition). These data shall have no proprietary period.
Data release
An observing project is considered to be complete when:
- All scheduling blocks have been completed, the quality assurance process has demonstrated that the resultant data have acceptable quality according to the user-specified scientific or technical justification, and all data products have been delivered
- And/or all unexecuted or incomplete scheduling blocks have been administratively removed from the execution queue, and all data products have been delivered.
The interval between the completion of the run or of the period and the release of the data package to the PI is typically a few weeks, depending on the data volume. Eavesdropping will always be possible for the PIs to check the status of their project.
Quick releases of the data can be done under special cases: e.g. Targets of Opportunity, or data presenting possible technical problems in which case a quality assessment by the PI is needed.
Under exceptional circumstances, it is possible to do a quick data release of partially completed programs if a strong scientific justification exists. Users who feel that they need a quick data release should write to the ESO ALMA Regional Centre, indicating in their writing the reasons that require it. These reasons need to be evaluated by ESO on scientific grounds in order to decide whether or not the quick data release can be granted.
Data packages
ALMA archival raw and processed data for specific programs will be available to the PIs of those programs as soon as possible after the data are physically present in the ALMA archive.
Complete data distribution packages include the final science images and calibration data, as well as several README and log files. Under specific request from the PIs raw data are also included. These data distribution packages are organized by the ESO ARC and the Data Flow Operations Group.
Quick data releases include only raw science data. Appropriate calibration data can be directly selected by the users by means of an archive query, since they are not subjected to any proprietary period.