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The impact of climate change on astronomical observations

Nature Astronomy volume 4, pages 826–829 (2020)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 20 May 2021

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Climate change is affecting and will increasingly affect astronomical observations, particularly in terms of dome seeing, surface layer turbulence, atmospheric water vapour content and the wind-driven halo effect in exoplanet direct imaging.

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Fig. 1: Temperature in the region around Paranal Observatory.
Fig. 2: Surface layer seeing.
Fig. 3: Horizontal speed of the jet stream.
Fig. 4: Integrated water vapour.

Change history

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our collaborators, who assisted us in collecting the data and shared their thoughts about the present study: M. Boccas (ESO), E. Fuenteseca (ESO), I. Muñoz (ESO), E. Peña (ESO), E. Masciadri (INAF), F. Kerber (ESO), S. Perera (MPIA), L. Burtscher (NOVA) and the Astronomers For Planet Earth collective. C. Böhm and S. Crewell gratefully acknowledge financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) — project number 268236062 — SFB 1211. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6. We thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access, and the multiple funding agencies who support CMIP6 and ESGF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany

    Faustine Cantalloube

  2. Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, Grenoble, France

    Julien Milli

  3. European Southern Observatory, Santiago, Chile

    Julien Milli & Julio Navarrete

  4. Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Christoph Böhm & Susanne Crewell

  5. Institute of Environmental Physics and Heidelberg Center for the Environment, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    Kira Rehfeld & Anna Sommani

  6. European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany

    Marc Sarazin

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  1. Faustine Cantalloube
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Correspondence to Faustine Cantalloube.

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Cantalloube, F., Milli, J., Böhm, C. et al. The impact of climate change on astronomical observations. Nat Astron 4, 826–829 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-020-1203-3

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