Climate Change and Its Impact on Ground Based Astronomical Observations
A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Climatology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 February 2025 | Viewed by 197
Special Issue Editor
Interests: climate variability
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Climate change is affecting and will increasingly affect astronomical observations. For ground-based astronomical facilities with a typical lifetime of at least 30 years, it is essential to be aware of future climate evolution to optimize observation strategies and instrumental upgrades. New facilities have been introduced and others are in the planning phase. New areas of the world become appropriate for astronomy while others suffer declining interest. Further investigation is needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms of change and assess the impact's severity.
What are the underlying mechanisms of change? Which part of the atmosphere is directly concerned? Most observatories provide in situ measurements of local weather, and several operate dedicated instruments directly monitoring atmospheric turbulence parameters, which can be used to validate the output of the highest resolution global climate models available. The horizontal resolution of the meteorological models is constantly improving, allowing realistic forecasts of the local flow even in such irregular high-altitude terrain where most large facilities are located. Moreover, the vertical mesh of the models in the free atmosphere is now fine enough to attempt modeling the fine structures of the thermal turbulence and, consequently, its dependency on climate evolution.
How severe is climate change for the scientific throughput of a ground-based observatory? Which observing mode is directly impacted by the long-term change in a given meteorological parameter? Modern ground-based astronomy produces a wealth of progressively made publicly available scientific data, which can be used for instrument performance analysis and cross-compared to meteorological trends.
Dr. Marc S. Sarazin
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- cloud cover
- precipitable water vapor
- seeing
- wavefront coherence time
- vertical turbulence profiles
- local ambient conditions
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