The Carbon Footprint of Astronomical Research Infrastructures

Content of the directory

This record contains code and data that were used for the paper

Knoedlseder, J., et al. Estimate of the carbon footprint of astronomical research infrastructures, Nature Astronomy, in press.

Data

The file ri-carbon-footprint.xls contains all data that were used for the analysis in the paper.

The file is an excel file containing the following tabs:

Description - a description of the excel file

Summary - summary of the findings of the carbon footprint estimates

Carbon footprint (ground) - Master table for carbon footprint of ground-based observatories

Carbon footprint (space) - Master table for carbon footprint of space missions

Emission factors - Collection of emission factors used as input to the study

Active infrastructures - List of astronomical facilities that were active worldwide in 2019

Community - Astronomical community and IAU members for several countries (Ahn, S.H., Economic Power, Population, and Size of Astronomical Community, JKAS, 52, 159 (2019).

Code

The record contains three Python scripts.

adsquery.py

Script to query the ADS database to extract number of publications for a given facility. The script also determines the number of unique authors. It returns global numbers since the start of the mission or observatory operations, and numbers restricted to IRAP.

bootstrap.py

Script to bootstrap the considered facilities to extrapolate the carbon footprint to all infrastructures that exist worldwide. The script also produces Figure 1 of the paper.

carbonintensity.py

Script to generate various figures from the excel data, and in particular the carbon intensity Figure 2 of the paper. Running the script requires the "xlrd" Python module that can be installed via conda.