Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial
Environments with Dynamics 1.0: A General Circulation Model for Simulating
the Climates of Rocky Planets
Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments
with Dynamics (ROCKE-3D) is a 3-Dimensional General Circulation Model (GCM)
developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies for the modeling of
atmospheres of Solar System and exoplanetary terrestrial planets. Its parent
model, known as ModelE2 (Schmidt et al. 2014), is used to simulate modern and
21st Century Earth and near-term paleo-Earth climates. ROCKE-3D is an ongoing
effort to expand the capabilities of ModelE2 to handle a broader range of
atmospheric conditions including higher and lower atmospheric pressures, more
diverse chemistries and compositions, larger and smaller planet radii and
gravity, different rotation rates (slowly rotating to more rapidly rotating
than modern Earth, including synchronous rotation), diverse ocean and land
distributions and topographies, and potential basic biosphere functions. The
first aim of ROCKE-3D is to model planetary atmospheres on terrestrial worlds
within the Solar System such as paleo-Earth, modern and paleo-Mars,
paleo-Venus, and Saturn's moon Titan. By validating the model for a broad range
of temperatures, pressures, and atmospheric constituents we can then expand its
capabilities further to those exoplanetary rocky worlds that have been
discovered in the past and those to be discovered in the future. We discuss the
current and near-future capabilities of ROCKE-3D as a community model for
studying planetary and exoplanetary atmospheres.Comment: Revisions since previous draft. Now submitted to Astrophysical
Journal Supplement Serie