The Buzzard Flock: Dark Energy Survey Synthetic Sky Catalogs
Abstract
We present a suite of 18 synthetic sky catalogs designed to support science analysis of galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 (DES Y1) data. For each catalog, we use a computationally efficient empirical approach, ADDGALS, to embed galaxies within light-cone outputs of three dark matter simulations that resolve halos with masses above ~5x10^12 h^-1 m_sun at z <= 0.32 and 10^13 h^-1 m_sun at z~2. The embedding method is tuned to match the observed evolution of galaxy counts at different luminosities as well as the spatial clustering of the galaxy population. Galaxies are lensed by matter along the line of sight --- including magnification, shear, and multiple images --- using CALCLENS, an algorithm that calculates shear with 0.42 arcmin resolution at galaxy positions in the full catalog. The catalogs presented here, each with the same LCDM cosmology (denoted Buzzard), contain on average 820 million galaxies over an area of 1120 square degrees with positions, magnitudes, shapes, photometric errors, and photometric redshift estimates. We show that the weak-lensing shear catalog, redMaGiC galaxy catalogs and redMaPPer cluster catalogs provide plausible realizations of the same catalogs in the DES Y1 data by comparing their magnitude, color and redshift distributions, angular clustering, and mass-observable relations, making them useful for testing analyses that use these samples. We make public the galaxy samples appropriate for the DES Y1 data, as well as the data vectors used for cosmology analyses on these simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1901.02401,
title = {The Buzzard Flock: Dark Energy Survey Synthetic Sky Catalogs},
author = {Joseph DeRose and Risa H. Wechsler and Matthew R. Becker and Michael T. Busha and Eli S. Rykoff and Niall MacCrann and Brandon Erickson and August E. Evrard and Andrey Kravtsov and Daniel Gruen and Sahar Allam and Santiago Avila and Sarah Bridle and David Brooks and Elizabeth Buckley-Geer and Aurelio Carnero Rosell and Matias Carrasco Kind and Jorge Carretero and Francisco J. Castander and Ross Cawthon and Martin Crocce and Luiz N. da Costa and Christopher Davis and Juan De Vicente and Jörg P. Dietrich and Peter Doel and Alex Drlica-Wagner and Pablo Fosalba and Josh Frieman and Juan Garcia-Bellido and Gaston Gutierrez and Will G. Hartley and Devon L. Hollowood and Ben Hoyle and David J. James and Elisabeth Krause and Kyler Kuehn and Nikolay Kuropatkin and Marcos Lima and Marcio A. G. Maia and Felipe Menanteau and Christopher J. Miller and Ramon Miquel and Ricardo L. C. Ogando and Andrés Plazas Malagón and A. Kathy Romer and Eusebio Sanchez and Rafe Schindler and Santiago Serrano and Ignacio Sevilla-Noarbe and Mathew Smith and Eric Suchyta and Molly E. C. Swanson and Gregory Tarle and Vinu Vikram},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.02401},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
33 pages, 13 figures, catalogs will be made public upon publication; interested users may contact us beforehand