Poisson and readnoise variances are added to the frame at the start of the pipeline. These are propagated all the way through the pipeline if KAPPA 1.0 or newer is used. If an older version of KAPPA is used then the variance will be lost when the data is formed into a datacube. A warning will be shown if this happens.
The values of adjacent pixels in the output frame are correlated due
to resampling in the y and
directions, so strictly
speaking the variance of the final frame should be represented by an
enormous covariance array. This would not be practical, so the
variance array is propagated by resampling it in the same way as the
data array, which while not rigorously correct should provide a
useful estimate of the variance.
ORAC-DR -- integral field spectroscopy data reduction