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The future extremely large telescopes (ELTs) are expected to be powerfultools to probe the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using high-dispersionspectroscopy, with the potential to detect molecular oxygen in Earth-likeplanets transiting nearby, late-type stars. So far, simulations haveconcentrated on the optical 7600 \AA{} A-band of oxygen using synthetic noisedistributions. In this paper, we build upon previous work to predict thedetectability of molecular oxygen in nearby, temperate planets by usingarchival, time-series data of Proxima Centauri from the high-dispersion UVESspectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). The brightest transitingM-dwarfs are expected to be about 25 times fainter than Proxima, a factor thatis similar to the difference in light-gathering power between the VLT and thefuture ELTs. By injecting synthetic oxygen transmission signals into the UVESdata, the $\mathrm{O}_2$ detectability can be studied in the presence of realdata with real noise properties. Correcting for the relatively low throughput($\sim$4%) of the Proxima spectra to an assumed 20% throughput for ahigh-dispersion spectrograph on the European ELT, we find that the molecularoxygen signature of an Earth-twin transiting a nearby ($d \approx 7\,\mathrm{pc}$) M5V star can be detected in 20-50 transits (a total of 70-175hours of observing time). This estimate using more realistic simulations isclose to previous predictions. Novel concepts that increase the instrumentalthroughput can further reduce the time span over which such observations needto be taken.

Testing the Detectability of Extraterrestrial $\mathrm{O}_2$ with the ELTs using Real Data with Real Noise