Papers › The Buzzard Flock: Dark Energy Survey Synthetic Sky Catalogs

The Buzzard Flock: Dark Energy Survey Synthetic Sky Catalogs

8 Jan 2019arXiv:1901.02401links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Joseph DeRose, Risa H. Wechsler, Matthew R. Becker, Michael T. Busha, Eli S. Rykoff, Niall MacCrann, Brandon Erickson, August E. Evrard, Andrey Kravtsov, Daniel Gruen, Sahar Allam, Santiago Avila, Sarah Bridle, David Brooks, Elizabeth Buckley-Geer, Aurelio Carnero Rosell, Matias Carrasco Kind, Jorge Carretero, Francisco J. Castander, Ross Cawthon, Martin Crocce, Luiz N. da Costa, Christopher Davis, Juan De Vicente, Jörg P. Dietrich, Peter Doel, Alex Drlica-Wagner, Pablo Fosalba, Josh Frieman, Juan Garcia-Bellido, Gaston Gutierrez, Will G. Hartley, Devon L. Hollowood, Ben Hoyle, David J. James, Elisabeth Krause, Kyler Kuehn, Nikolay Kuropatkin, Marcos Lima, Marcio A. G. Maia, Felipe Menanteau, Christopher J. Miller, Ramon Miquel, Ricardo L. C. Ogando, Andrés Plazas Malagón, A. Kathy Romer, Eusebio Sanchez, Rafe Schindler, Santiago Serrano, Ignacio Sevilla-Noarbe, Mathew Smith, Eric Suchyta, Molly E. C. Swanson, Gregory Tarle, Vinu Vikram

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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.

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