Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

The impact of climate change on astronomical observations

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

Subjects

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

This article has been updated

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.

Astronomers are entering an era in which they will change the way they work, with the arrival of the 30–40 m class ground-based telescopes and large international observational projects sparking new ways of communicating and collaborating. These scientific challenges come together with societal ones, such as the role astronomers play in communicating and undertaking actions to significantly reduce the environmental footprint of astronomical research. More generally, it is urgent that astronomers, through their unique perspective on the Universe, communicate about and act on climate change consequences at any level. In this context, we have investigated the role some key weather parameters play in the quality of astronomical observations and analysed their long-term (longer than 30 years) trends in order to grasp the impact of climate change on future observations. In what follows we give four examples of how climate change already affects or could potentially affect the operations of an astronomical observatory. This preliminary study is conducted with data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), located at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert, Chile, which is one of the driest places on Earth. For the analyses presented below, we used the various sensors installed at Paranal Observatory but also, to show a longer time span (from 1980 to the present), we used the fifth generation European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate, ERA51, with a spatial resolution of 31 km, which we interpolated at the Paranal Observatory location. To investigate longer timescale evolution (from 1900 to 2010), at a cost of a coarser spatial resolution (130 km) that averages the actual orography and may blend the ocean–continent interfaces, we in some cases used the ERA20C reanalysis data2. In addition, we explored climate projections in this region, using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) multi-model ensemble3, under the worst-case climate change Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP5-8.5) scenario. Further investigation is needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms of change, as well as to assess the severity of the impact.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

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

References

  1. ERA5 Hourly Data on Single Levels from 1979 to Present (ECMWF, CAMS, C3S, accessed July 2020); https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47

  2. Poli, P. et al. J. Clim. 29, 4083–4097 (2016).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  3. Eyring, V. et al. Geosci. Model Dev. 9, 1937–1958 (2016).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  4. IPCC Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report (eds Core Writing Team Pachauri, R. K. & Meyer, L. A.) (IPCC, 2014).

  5. Tallis, M. et al. J. Astron. Telesc. Instrum. Syst. 6, 015002 (2020).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  6. Tokovinin, A. Proc. SPIE 7733, 77331N (2010).

    ADS  Google Scholar 

  7. Sarazin, M., Melnick, J., Navarrete, J. & Lombardi, G. Messenger 132, 11–17 (2008).

    ADS  Google Scholar 

  8. Tokovinin, A. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac. 114, 1156–1166 (2002).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  9. IPCC Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).

  10. Cantalloube, F. et al. Astron. Astrophys. 638, A98 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Madurowicz, A. et al. Proc. SPIE 10703, 107036E (2018).

    Google Scholar 

  12. Trenberth, K. & National Center for Atmospheric Research Staff (eds) The Climate Data Guide: Nino SST Indices (Nino 1+2, 3, 3.4, 4; ONI and TNI) (NCAR, 2020); https://go.nature.com/2PZ4zLp

  13. Cai, W. et al. Nat. Rev. Earth Environ. 1, 215–231 (2020).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  14. Grothe, P. R. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 47, e83906 (2020).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  15. Zhou, J. & Lau, K.-M. J. Clim. 11, 1020–1040 (1998).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  16. Guan, B. & Waliser, D. E. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 120, 12514–12535 (2015).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  17. Rehfeld, K., Hébert, R., Lora, J. M., Lofverstrom, M. & Brierly, C. M. Earth Syst. Dynam. 11, 447–468 (2020).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  18. Bozkurt, D., Rondanelli, R., Garreaud, R. & Arriagada, A. Mon. Weather Rev. 144, 4441–4460 (2016).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  19. Böhm, C., Reyers, M., Schween, J. H. & Crewell, S. Glob. Planet. Change 190, 103192 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Kerber, F. et al. Proc. SPIE 8446, 84463N (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Beuzit, J.-L. et al. Astron. Astrophys. 631, A155 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

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.

Author information

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

Authors
  1. Faustine Cantalloube
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Julien Milli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Christoph Böhm
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Susanne Crewell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Julio Navarrete
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Kira Rehfeld
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Marc Sarazin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Anna Sommani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Faustine Cantalloube.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-020-1203-3

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing