Hi all,
Just as an FYI (since proposals for sessions are due today - https://project.lsst.org/meetings/lsst2019/node/add/session), we will be proposing for two survey strategy related sessions:
LSST Observing Strategy: Status and Planning Session
The project team has been busy flexing the scheduler to create new simulations based on guidelines from the SAC (and based on the Survey Strategy Whitepapers submitted last November). We will present some of the early results of this process, with several new simulations including rolling cadence simulations. We will talk about the plan for further survey strategy work up to the early 2020 deadline to pass these survey strategy evaluations over to the SCOC (the “Survey Cadence Optimization Committee”, a community-based committee set up by the LSST Operations Director). The process of working through the various ‘families’ of survey strategies is an iterative one with necessary intermediate feedback from the science community. While this process will have begun by August and has a strong online component, we will also use this opportunity to have face-to-face discussion as well.
Evaluating the LSST Observing Strategy: Metrics
Evaluating the various simulated survey strategies is complex and involves many metrics. We will demonstrate the metrics currently being calculated on the various survey strategies and how they vary between runs. Then we hope to involve the community in a discussion covering (a) how accurate or complete are the metrics relevant to your science? (b) how can we weight different metrics together (or if considering groups of metrics separately, how do we separate them)? and © what is reasonable to present to the SCOC (Survey Cadence Optimization Committee)? We will be approaching these questions with the science collaborations independently, but this is a great opportunity to discuss this as an entire community and look at cross-cutting questions. If time is available, we may dive into a deeper discussion of individual metrics or have a short metric hack session.
-Lynne