Impact of survey spatial variability on galaxy redshift distributions and the cosmological $3\times2$-point statistics for the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)

Abstract

We investigate the impact of spatial survey non-uniformity on the galaxy redshift distributions for forthcoming data releases of the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Specifically, we construct a mock photometry dataset degraded by the Rubin OpSim observing conditions, and estimate photometric redshifts of the sample using a template-fitting photo-$z$ estimator, BPZ, and a machine learning method, FlexZBoost. We select the Gold sample, defined as $i<25.3$ for 10 year LSST data, with an adjusted magnitude cut for each year and divide it into five tomographic redshift bins for the weak lensing lens and source samples. We quantify the change in the number of objects, mean redshift, and width of each tomographic bin as a function of the coadd $i$-band depth for 1-year (Y1), 3-year (Y3), and 5-year (Y5) data. In particular, Y3 and Y5 have large non-uniformity due to the rolling cadence of LSST, hence provide a worst-case scenario of the impact from non-uniformity. We find that these quantities typically increase with depth, and the variation can be $10-40\%$ at extreme depth values. Based on these results and using Y3 as an example, we propagate the variable depth effect to the weak lensing $3\times2$pt data vector in harmonic space. We find that galaxy clustering is most susceptible to variable depth, causing significant deviations at large scales if not corrected for, due to the depth-dependent number density variations. For galaxy-shear and shear-shear power spectra, we find little impact given the expected LSST Y3 noise.