Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.1402b&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #14.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.407
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Thermal Emission Spectrometer's (TES) 3-year record and regular coverage revealed the weather systems on Mars with unprecedented detail from 10km to 40km altitude (e.g., Banfield et al., 2002, 2004). However, most of the atmospheric mass and many of the processes affecting surface-atmosphere interaction reside in the lowest scale height (0-10km), which was not well observed by MGS TES (time variable temperatures may be underestimated due to confusion from sluggish surface radiances). Because of the importance of understanding the global behavior of Mars’ boundary layer, we attempted to use the MGS TES data to indirectly quantify the expression of the weather phenomena in the Martian boundary layer. Because the radiative coupling between the atmosphere and surface can be relatively well determined, we could use the time varying surface temperatures as a proxy for the time varying atmospheric boundary layer temperatures. We developed a simple analytic model for the radiative coupling between atmosphere and surface for different periodic waves. This was calibrated by matching the model to the MGS TES time mean surface and atmospheric temperatures. We then looked for traveling wave surface temperature perturbations that were correlated with the poorly-quantified MGS TES atmospheric boundary layer temperature perturbations and were more than 1 latitude bin in extent. This effort found no credible surface temperature waves, but established an upper limit for their expression of 0.5K. From our model, this implies that the zonally averaged boundary layer traveling wave temperature amplitudes do not exceed 3K in any region of the MGS TES data in the 4 degree meridional resolution of our analysis. This suggests that the atmospheric boundary layer traveling wave temperature amplitudes observed in the MGS TES data are in fact rather well quantified in spite of the potential confusion with surface radiance.
Analysis funded by MDAP-NNG05GQ62G.
Banfield Don
Conrath Barney
Gierasch Peter
Smith Marcie
Toigo Alessandro
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