Identification and filtering of uncharacteristic noise in the CMS hadron calorimeter

Commissioning studies of the CMS hadron calorimeter have identified sporadic
uncharacteristic noise and a small number of malfunctioning calorimeter
channels. Algorithms have been developed to identify and address these problems
in the data. The methods have been tested on cosmic ray muon data, calorimeter
noise data, and single beam data collected with CMS in 2008. The noise
rejection algorithms can be applied to LHC collision data at the trigger level
or in the offline analysis. The application of the algorithms at the trigger
level is shown to remove 90% of noise events with fake missing transverse
energy above 100 GeV, which is sufficient for the CMS physics trigger
operation.