Martian Winter Hemisphere Noncondensable Atmospheric Gas Abundance Enhancement: Numerical Simulations And Investigation Of Dynamical Mechanisms

Details Martian Winter Hemisphere Noncondensable Atmospheric Gas Abundance Enhancement: Numerical Simulations And Investigation Of Dynamical Mechanisms Martian Winter Hemisphere Noncondensable Atmospheric Gas Abundance Enhancement: Numerical Simulations And Investigation Of Dynamical Mechanisms

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.6006m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #60.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.598

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The enhancement at winter polar latitudes of noncondensable gases in Mars’ atmosphere is investigated with a global-scale numerical model. Mars Odyssey gamma ray spectrometer observations indicate a six-fold increase in noncondensable column-integrated gas relative abundance at high southern latitudes during early southern winter, and a three-fold increase at high northern latitudes during early northern winter [Sprague et al., 2006, JGR-Planets, accepted]. The enhancement arises from the condensation of the primary atmospheric gas, CO2, which falls as `snow’ to the surface (or directly condenses there) and forms the seasonal polar cap. The condensing CO2 "leaves behind” in the atmosphere noncondensable gases such as nitrogen and argon.
Atmospheric simulations qualitatively reproduce the nocondensable gas enhancement, but at a magnitude of only one-half that observed. The simulated noncondensable gas enhancement magnitude is governed by the seasonal timing and magnitude of horizontal mixing of the enhanced high latitude gas with less enhanced gas from lower latititudes. This horizontal mixing is produced to a large extent by traveling baroclinic eddies, which become established at and engender the time of the enhancement maxima. The north polar vs. south polar relative enhancement magnitude differences arise from the differences in column CO2 mass abundance (surface pressure) between the high-topography south pole and the low-topography north pole. Maximum absolute column abundances (g cm-2) of noncondensable gas occurring at the two poles are of approximately equal magnitude.
Model results and sensitivity study results will be presented. This effort makes use of the transport of truly passive tracers in the martian atmosphere to understand atmospheric dynamical processes and model fidelity.
This work has been supported in part by NASA's Planetary Atmospheres Program (NAG5-12123). We acknowledge the efforts of the entire MRO GRS team.

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