Mock light-cones and theory friendly catalogues for the CANDELS survey

We present mock catalogs created to support the interpretation of the CANDELS survey. We extract halos along past lightcones from the Bolshoi Planck dissipationless N-body simulations and populate these halos with galaxies using two different independently developed semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and the empirical model UniverseMachine. Our mock catalogs have geometries that encompass the footprints of observations associated with the five CANDELS fields. In order to allow field-to-field variance to be explored, we have created eight realizations of each field. In this paper, we present comparisons with observable global galaxy properties, including counts in observed frame bands, luminosity functions, color-magnitude distributions and color-color distributions. We additionally present comparisons with physical galaxy parameters derived from SED fitting for the CANDELS observations, such as stellar masses and star formation rates. We find relatively good agreement between the model predictions and CANDELS observations for luminosity and stellar mass functions. We find poorer agreement for colors and star formation rate distributions. All of the mock lightcones as well as curated "theory friendly" versions of the observational CANDELS catalogs are made available through a web-based data hub.