Titan's Tropical Climate

Details Titan's Tropical Climate Titan's Tropical Climate

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.8502m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #85.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.876

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We will review our understanding of the climate of Titan based on observations, theory, and modeling. The nature of observed phenomena, such as methane clouds (e.g. Griffith et al. 05, Tokano et al. 06), the vertical profile of methane in the lower atmosphere (Niemann et al. 05), and low-latitude dunes (Lorenz et al. 06), can generally be understood in analogy to Earth's tropics. The slow rotation rate and small size of Titan relative to Earth dictate a global overturning tropical circulation, or Hadley cell, which acts to homogenize atmospheric temperatures. Though probably less than 0.1 W/m^2 is available at the surface to evaporate methane (McKay et al. 91), the global Hadley cell focuses latent energy into one or two updrafts, producing the observed isolated convective clouds. Unlike the oceans on Earth which integrate over the seasons, Titan's solid, low-heat-capacity surface allows the Hadley cell to seasonally oscillate. The resulting climatology of methane hydrology creates the low-latitude deserts observed by Cassini; the mechanism sustaining these deserts is directly analogous to that of the subtropical deserts on Earth. Surface methane available at high latitudes evaporates and is roughly conserved during transport by the Hadley cell to lower latitudes where temperatures are, on average, higher, thus lowering the relative humidity. This transport mechanism is sufficient to explain the vertical profile of methane in the lower atmosphere observed by the Huygens probe (Niemann et al 05). A layer of condensing methane forms over much of the summer hemisphere at the top of the Hadley cell, which explains the low-latitude methane cloud observed by Huygens and ground-based telescopes (Tokano et al. 06, Adamkovics et al. 07).

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