Terminology. All discussions below apply to timeseries of **data** from a single sensor, in particular screen level air temperature. We think of such a timeseries as a **data** matrix X dt indexed by a calendar date d (rows; 'date axis') and a time t (columns; 'time axis'). The time period affected by the eclipse will be given the symbol t • ; this includes the full duration of the eclipse (C1-C4), plus an additional time span beyond C4 to account for some dynamical lag in the system (see Table 1). Conversely, all times not affected by the eclipse are symbolised by t • . Analogously, the day of the eclipse will be denoted d • and all other days by d • . When we talk about an average over a number of days, we mean that the averaging is performed over the date dimension and the result is a onedimensional array indexed by times (a daily cycle). All **data** used in this study comes from the meteorological surface station network operated by the Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Áridas (CEAZA) in La Serena, Chile, from here on called the CEAZAMet station network.