Forecasting Martian Dust Devils

Details Forecasting Martian Dust Devils Forecasting Martian Dust Devils

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.6004h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #60.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.598

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

In recent years, there have been at least two broad surveys of dust devil activity over various regions of Mars (Balme et al., 2003) (Fisher et al., 2005). The results of these surveys provide useful constraints for designing and testing new schemes for forecasting Martian dust devils, in particular their number density and size at a given place and time. This endeavor would be useful both for future spacecraft operations and improved dust cycle simulation within Martian general circulation models. At present, the predominant scheme for dust devil forecasting is based on Renno et al. (1998), which as presently applied only gives a relative measure of the maximum incidence of dust devils in a given area based on thermodynamic considerations and predictions of their wind velocities etc. In this study, the Mars implementation of the Planetary Weather Research and Forecasting Model (planetWRF) and the results of the surveys are used to demonstrate that dust devil formation is likely more mechanically than thermodynamically controlled. As an alternative, we propose the existence of one or multiple "nucleation criteria” for dust devil formation that can be combined with the well-known size-duration relation for terrestrial dust devils (Sinclair, 1966) in order to forecast number density. We use planetWRF output and survey data to evaluate various nucleation criteria based on: (1) inhibition of convection by near-surface mechanical turbulence (Deardorff, 1972); (2) inhibition or enhancement of convection by mesoscale to synoptic scale wind systems; and (3) the possibility of the dust devil's rotation inhibiting its own convective support within the near-surface superadiabatic layer. This work is supported in part by NASA. The numerical simulations for this research were performed on Caltech's CITerra cluster.

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