The extreme sensitivity required for direct observation of gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO detectors means that environmental noise can potentially contaminate gravitational wave signals. Consequently, environmental monitoring efforts have been undertaken and novel noise mitigation techniques have been developed which have helped keep environmental artifacts from influencing gravitational wave detections for the $90$ gravitational wave events detected from 2015--2020 by the aLIGO detectors. The increasing rate of gravitational wave detections due to detector sensitivity improvements requires sophisticated, reliable and automated ways to monitor and assess the degree of environmental coupling between gravitational wave detectors and their surroundings. We introduce a computational tool, PEMcheck, for quantifying the degree of environmental coupling present in gravitational wave signals using data from the network of environmental monitoring sensors. We study its performance when applied to the $79$ gravitational waves confidently detected in LIGO's third observing run and test its performance in the case of extreme environmental contamination of gravitational wave data. We find that PEMcheck's automated analysis identifies only a small number of gravitational waves that merit further study by environmental noise experts due to possible contamination, a substantial improvement over the manual vetting that occurred for every gravitational wave candidate in previous observing runs. Overall, PEMcheck works as intended. Consequently, PEMcheck will play a critical role in event validation during LIGO's fourth observing run.
Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures