Correction of Electric StandingWaves.

Electric Standing Waves (ESW) appear in some frequency bands of HIFI, a heterodyne spectrometer aboard the Herschel Space Observatory. ESWs consist of about 10 irregular ripples added to a continuum contribution. They distort the spectra and should be removed. ESWs change so rapidly that the standard ways to mitigate them, do not work. We have built a catalog of thousands of spectra taken on empty sky that contain only the ESW contribution. All ESWs seem to belong to a limited number of multiplicative families. To find representative members of the families we modelled them as splines and chose one representative template model for each family based on Bayesian evidence. The resulting set of models is our catalog of possible ESW templates. To correct a spectrum taken on an astronomical source, we select the template from the catalog that fits with the highest Bayesian evidence and subtract it. This has to be done in the possible presence of spectral lines and of a true astronomical continuuum. Both the true lines and continuum should be unaffected by the procedure. To exclude the lines we use a robustly weighted variety of the (gaussian) likelihood. Ideally the correction should be part of the pipeline with which all HIFI observations have to be processed. This requires a procedure having no failures, no interaction, and limited CPU usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]