Recent advances in theoretical and experimental spectroscopy demonstrate that physical inadequacies in standard Voigt molecular line shape models degrade laboratory and atmospheric spectral curve-fitting retrievals even for state-of-the-art spectrometers. More sophisticated physics associated with molecular collisions (line mixing, speed dependence, narrowing etc.) are generally known, but the atmospheric and laboratory spectroscopy communities lack a comprehensive (validated) software required

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... to compute the very accurate synthetic spectra needed for the retrieval process. For the remote sensing of important greenhouse gases (e.g. CO2, CH4 and H2O), these deficiencies must be corrected in order to achieve abundances with the 0.3% accuracies required for climate change science. We need an international effort to correct this situation.