Formats

The CHIME/FRB Experiment either the msgpack data format to store raw channelized intensity data, npz file format for processed intensity or baseband data and the CHIME/Pulsar Experiment uses the filterbank data format. For more information on the instrument parameters refer to The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project: System Overview.

msgpack

msgpack data is the beamformed and channelized intensity data which consists of 16384 frequency channels at 1ms cadence. This data is scaled, offset, and packed into 8-bit integers files each consisting of 1.00663296s worth of data.

In order to read and uncompress the msgpack data into numpy arrays, checkout the cfod python package.

filterbank

Filterbank data for the fast radio bursts presented in the data release were analyzed using pubicly availaible packages presto and sigproc.

npz

A dictionary-like object with lazy-loading of files in the zipped archive, for further reading see official numpy documentation. See the code snippets section for more details on paper specific details.

h5

The Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5), is an open source file format that supports large, complex, heterogeneous data. HDF5 uses a file directory like structure that allows you to organize data within the file in many different structured ways, as you might do with files on your computer