A diagnosis of low-order dynamics in the atmosphere of Mars

Abstract

Introduction: There is considerable evidence that shows that the Martian atmosphere behaves in a more regular fashion than its terrestrial counterpart [1, 2, 3, 4]. This evidence leads to the hypothesis of theMartian climate attractor being of a relatively low dimension, which, in turn, would imply the possibility of describing the state of the atmosphere by means of a relatively few degrees of freedom. We explore this hypothesis by assuming that the atmospheric total energy (TE), i.e. the sum of kinetic energy and total potential energy (gravitational potential energy plus internal energy), is confined in a few coherent structures which dynamically interact nonlinearly with each other