Seasonal thaws under mid-to-low pressure atmospheres on Early Mars

Despite decades of scientific research on the subject, the climate of the first 1.5 Gyr of Mars history has not been fully understood yet. Especially challenging is the need to reconcile the presence of liquid water for extended periods of time on the martian surface with the comparatively low insolation received by the planet, a problem which is known as the Faint Young Sun (FYS) Paradox. In this paper we use ESTM, a latitudinal energy balance model with enhanced prescriptions for meridional heat diffusion, and the radiative transfer code EOS to investigate how seasonal variations of temperature can give rise to local conditions which are conductive to liquid water runoffs. We include the effects of the martian dichotomy, a northern ocean with either 150 or 550 m of Global Equivalent Layer (GEL) and simplified CO$_2$ or H$_2$O clouds. We find that 1.3-to-2.0 bar CO$_2$-dominated atmospheres can produce seasonal thaws due to inefficient heat redistribution, provided that the eccentricity and the obliquity of the planet are sufficiently different from zero. We also studied the impact of different values for the argument of perihelion. When local favorable conditions exist, they nearly always persist for $>15\%$ of the martian year. These results are obtained without the need for additional greenhouse gases (e.g. H$_2$, CH$_4$) or transient heat-injecting phenomena (e.g. asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions). Moderate amounts (0.1 to 1\%) of CH$_4$ significantly widens the parameter space region in which seasonal thaws are possible.Comment: Second and final version, 27 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

EOS: Atmospheric Radiative Transfer in Habitable Worlds with HELIOS

We present EOS, a procedure for determining the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) albedo for a wide range of conditions expected to be present in the atmospheres of rocky planets with temperate conditions. EOS is based on HELIOS and HELIOS-K, which are novel and publicly available atmospheric radiative transfer (RT) codes optimized for fast calculations with GPU processors. These codes were originally developed for the study of giant planets. In this paper we present an adaptation for applications to terrestrial-type, habitable planets, adding specific physical recipes for the gas opacity and vertical structure of the atmosphere. To test the reliability of the procedure, we assessed the impact of changing line opacity profile, continuum opacity model, atmospheric lapse rate, and tropopause position prescriptions on the OLR and the TOA albedo. The results obtained with EOS are in line with those of other RT codes running on traditional CPU processors, while being at least one order of magnitude faster. The adoption of OLR and TOA albedo data generated with EOS in a zonal and seasonal climate model correctly reproduces the fluxes of the present-day Earth measured by the CERES spacecraft. The results of this study disclose the possibility to incorporate fast RT calculations in climate models aimed at characterizing the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets

Evidence of Kelvin-Helmholtz and tearing mode instabilities at the magnetopause during space weather events

Introduction: Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) and tearing mode (TM) instabilities are one of the most important mechanisms of solar wind energy, momentum and plasma transport within the magnetosphere.Methods: To investigate the conditions under which KHTM instabilities occur in the Earth environment it is fundamental to combine simultaneous multipoint in situ measurements and MHD simulations. We analyzed data from the THEMIS and Cluster spacecraft considering two Space Weather (SWE) events starting with an M2.0 flare event (hereafter Case-1) that occurred on 21 June 2015 and the most-intensive flare (X9.3) of solar cycle 24 that occurred on 6 September 2017 (hereafter Case-2).Results: Our analysis utilized a 2D MHD model for incompressible and viscous flow. The results from Case-1 indicate the presence of KH and TM instabilities, suggesting existence of observed low-amplitude oscillations at the nose of the magnetopause. However, the MHD simulations for Case-2 did not show any evidence of KH vortices, but did reveal the presence of “magnetic island” structures during a low-shear condition. The reconnection rate derived from the observations is compared with the computed one in the presence of developed instabilities inside the Earth’s magnetopause

Terrestrial-type planetary atmospheres with HELIOS

10siThe next generation of astronomical facilities will be able to retrieve exoplanetary atmospheric spectra in increasing quantity and of increasing quality. Radiative transfer (RT) models of these atmospheres is essential both for interpreting observational data and for linking these data to the planetary physical state with the aid of dedicated climate models. So far, a large effort has been placed in modelling the atmospheres of giant planets, which are the most easily accessible to observations. Now times are ripe to extend these studies to treat the relatively thin atmospheres of terrestrial-type exoplanets, which are the most likely targets for the search of atmospheric biomarkers.Here we present a procedure to perform radiative transfer calculations for terrestrial-type exoplanets with temperate physical conditions (Simonetti et al. in preparation). The procedure is based on HELIOS and HELIOS-K, which are novel, flexible and publicly available codes developed by the University of Bern (Grimm & Heng, 2015; Malik et al., 2017, 2019; Grimm et al., 2021) as a part of the Exoclime Simulation Platform (ESP) repository. These codes make full use of the computing power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs, colloquially known as graphics cards) being therefore much faster (up to one order of magnitude, see Grimm et al. 2021) than other similar codes and are integrated with a variety of molecular and atomic line repositories such as HITRAN (Gordon et al., 2017), HITEMP (Rothman et al., 2010) and Kurucz. Until now, HELIOS has been mostly applied to study Jupiter-like planets. The main features of the procedure that we have implemented for the treatment of rocky, habitable planets can be summarized as follows.First, we added the treatment of the continuum absorption features of a variety of gases, in particular H2O (Clough et al., 1989; Mlawer et al., 2012) and CO2 (Gruszka & Borysow, 1997; Baranov et al., 2004; Baranov, 2018). These continua strongly contribute to the overall opacity of Earth-like atmospheres and cannot be neglected. Second, we paid special attention to the sub-Lorentzian profile of CO2 absorption lines, testing the effects of different recipes (Perrin & Hartmann, 1989; Tonkov et al., 1996). Third, we considered different hypotheses regarding the convective lapse rate of the troposphere. On these basis we: (i) tested the robustness of HELIOS and HELIOS-K against changes in model variables and (ii) compared them with other codes already published and used in the same context (e.g. LBLRTM Clough et al., 2005), as done by Yang et al. (2016).One of the main goals of this work is to provide a new and fast radiative transfer treatment for the ESTM, an energy balance climate model with upgraded treatment of the vertical and horizontal energy transport Vladilo et al. (2015). The ESTM is extremely flexible and allows for a rapid exploration of the planetary and atmospheric parameter space, providing us the ability to map quantitative indices of habitability on these parameters (Silva et al., 2017). The flexibility of both HELIOS and ESTM will allow us to test a wide variety of atmospheric compositions, which have applications in the study both of exoplanets and of ancient Earth and Mars. Moreover, the HELIOS procedure adapted to terrestrial-type atmospheres can be used to generate synthetic TOA fluxes useful to link the conditions at the planet's surface with quantities that will become observable with future generations of instruments, such as secondary eclipse spectra and direct IR emission spectra from terrestrial-type exoplanets (see e.g. Quanz et al., 2021). Finally, the output of the same procedure can be applied to other codes in the ESP repository, such as the THOR GCM (Mendonca et al., 2016; Deitrick et al., 2020).Figure 1 shows the TOA albedo obtained for three different stellar spectral classes for different values of surface temperature and stellar zenith angle, for an atmosphere of 1 bar of CO2 and a relative H2O humidity of 100%, as obtained by HELIOS using the procedure presented in Simonetti et al. (in preparation). The surface albedo was set to 0.15.Figure 2 shows the relation between OLR and surface temperature for different radiative transfer models for an Earth-like atmosphere composed by N2, O2, 360 ppmv of CO2, 1.8 ppmv of CH4 and a temperature-dependent quantity of H2O (relative humidity equal to 100%). The thick red curve labelled "HELIOS" has been obtained with the novel procedure presented in Simonetti et al. (in preparation). The data relative to the other curves have been taken from Yang et al. (2016). REFERENCES:Baranov, Y. I. 2018, Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy, 345, 11Baranov, Y. I., La erty, W. J., & Fraser, G. T. 2004, Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy, 228, 432Clough, S. A., Kneizys, F. X., & Davies, R. W. 1989, Atmospheric Research, 23, 229Clough, S. A., Shephard, M. W., Mlawer, E. J., et al. 2005, JQSRT, 91, 233Deitrick, R., Mendonca, J. M., Schr...openopenSimonetti, Paolo; Vladilo, Giovanni; Malik, Matej; Silva, Laura; Ivanovski, Stavro; Maris, Michele; Murante, Giuseppe; Biasiotti, Lorenzo; Bisesi, Erica; Monai, SergioSimonetti, Paolo; Vladilo, Giovanni; Malik, Matej; Silva, Laura; Ivanovski, Stavro; Maris, Michele; Murante, Giuseppe; Biasiotti, Lorenzo; Bisesi, Erica; Monai, Sergi