It was discovered that the rolling cadence experiments released with the call for white papers (mothra_2045, pontus_2502, and kraken_2036) had some serious bugs (they are missing a large number of observations). Since exploring the impact of rolling cadences is a high priority, I’ve put together a pair of simulations that execute a rolling cadence strategy using the feature based scheduler.
These were run with Daniel Rothchild’s observatory model, so there are a few minor differences between this and usual OpSim runs. There’s no tracking of the camera rotation angle, there may or may not be dome creep included in the slew time calculation, and no tracking of the cable wrap.
These two simulations split the WFD area in half and alternate years of emphasis. The de-emphasized region is set to reach ~25% of it’s usual number of visits in a year. Only the WFD region changes cadence year-to-year, regions like the NES and South Celestial Pole should have a fairly uniform cadence.
In the rolling simulation, pairs are taken in g+g,r+r, and i+i. In the mixed, pairs are taken in g+r, r+i, and i+g. Thus the mixed survey has many more filter changes and slightly lower overall efficiency.
Since we are using the feature based scheduler spatial dithering is included (no need to use a MAF stacker).
The runs mostly match the standard OpSim output schema. There are a few columns (like poposalId) that are not relevant to the feature based scheduler, so are just set to constants.
The databases can be downloaded from these links:
https://lsst-web.ncsa.illinois.edu/sim-data/beta_slair_surveys/runs/rolling/rolling_10yrs_opsim.db
https://lsst-web.ncsa.illinois.edu/sim-data/beta_slair_surveys/runs/roll_mix/rolling_mix_10yrs_opsim.db
We’ll put up the standard MAF plots for them shortly.