A year in the life of the SKA

With the SKA telescopes now in their construction phase, the first science observations are almost in sight. In order to ensure that the planning, designs and operational model are optimised to deliver transformational science to the community, we have embarked on a detailed analysis of the end-to-end systems of both the Mid and Low telescopes. As well as considering the details of the system designs and operational plans, we have incorporated science planning from within the community to deliver a relatively sophisticated view a of year in the life of the SKA telescopes. This year in the life is incredibly valuable to the refinement of SKAOs plans as well as ensuring alignment across the breadth of planning activities that are ongoing across the two telescopes. In this talk I will describe the year in the life - which includes the development of subarray and substation templates, defining representative year-long telescope schedules and then analysing user support requirements, proposal loads, estimates of telescope availability (RFI, weather, maintenance), power usage, data rates, telescope mode, data product requests – and discuss how this work feeds back into our planning.