Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: The use of high-quality simulated sky catalogs is essential for the success of cosmological surveys. The catalogs have diverse applications, such as investigating signatures of fundamental physics in cosmological observables, understanding the effect of systematic uncertainties on measured signals and testing mitigation strategies for reducing these uncertainties, aiding analysis pipeline development and testing, and survey strategy optimization. The list of applications is growing with improvements in the quality of the catalogs and the details that they can provide. Given the importance of simulated catalogs, it is critical to provide rigorous validation protocols that enable both catalog providers and users to assess the quality of the catalogs in a straightforward and comprehensive way. For this purpose, we have developed the DESCQA framework for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Dark Energy Science Collaboration as well as for the broader community. The goal of DESCQA is to enable the inspection, validation, and comparison of an inhomogeneous set of synthetic catalogs via the provision of a common interface within an automated framework. In this paper, we present the design concept and first implementation of DESCQA. In order to establish and demonstrate its full functionality we use a set of interim catalogs and validation tests. We highlight several important aspects, both technical and scientific, that require thoughtful consideration when designing a validation framework, including validation metrics and how these metrics impose requirements on the synthetic sky catalogs.
Authors: Yao-Yuan Mao, Eve Kovacs, Katrin Heitmann, Thomas D. Uram, Andrew J. Benson, Duncan Campbell, Sofía A. Cora, Joseph DeRose, Tiziana Di Matteo, Salman Habib, Andrew P. Hearin, J. Bryce Kalmbach, K. Simon Krughoff, François Lanusse, Zarija Lukić, Rachel Mandelbaum, Jeffrey A. Newman, Nelson Padilla, Enrique Paillas, Adrian Pope, Paul M. Ricker, Andrés N. Ruiz, Ananth Tenneti, Cristian A. Vega-Martínez, Risa H. Wechsler, Rongpu Zhou, Ying Zu
Institutions: University of Pittsburgh, Argonne National Laboratory, Carnegie Observatories, Carnegie Mellon University, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Instituto de Astrofísica de La Plata, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, University of Washington, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Instituto de Astronomía Teórica y Experimental, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: G1141912172, G1229526393, G1286236842, Cosmic Web Reconstruction: A Unique Opportunity to Study the Cosmic Structures of the Universe, Estudio de sistemas estelares extragalácticos en ambientes de distinta densidad mediante observaciones y simulaciones numéricas., G2371548206, The First Billion Years: a Petascale Universe of Galaxies and Quasars, G303061748, G3083819904, PARTICLE PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, G419881185, G4201897825, G42916606, G4501827968, G495301720, G498139845, G5438923238, G5570207115, Miniquasars in the Dark Ages: Cosmological simulations of black holes with radiative transfer, G6447494072, G6652958823, G8382000481, Quasars and Large Scale Structure: Gigaparsec-scale simulations confront Large Survey Data, G8726098666, G969889393
OpenAlex ID: W2759567609