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Description
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope provides an unprecedented opportunity to study gamma-ray blazars. To capitalize on this opportunity, beginning in late 2007, about a year before the start of LAT science operations, we began a large-scale, fast-cadence 15GHz radio monitoring program with the 40m telescope at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO). This program began with the 1158 northern ({delta}>-20{deg}) sources from the Candidate Gamma-ray Blazar Survey and now encompasses over 1500 sources, each observed twice per week with about 4mJy (minimum) and 3% (typical) uncertainty. Here, we describe this monitoring program and our methods, and present radio light curves from the first two years (2008 and 2009). As a first application, we combine these data with a novel measure of light curve variability amplitude, the intrinsic modulation index, through a likelihood analysis to examine the variability properties of subpopulations of our sample.
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