Understanding Mars meteorology using a "new generation" Mars Global Climate Model.
Résumé
For more than 20 years, several teams around the world have developed GCMs (Mars General Circulation Model or Mars Global Climate) to simulate the environment on Mars. The GCM developed at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in collaboration with several teams in Europe (LATMOS, France, University of Oxford, The Open University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia), and with the support of ESA and CNES. is currently used for many kind of applications. It has become a "Mars System Model" which, for instance, includes the water cycle, the dust cycle, several photochemistry cycles, the release and transport of Radon, water isotopes cycles, a therrmosphere and a Ionosphere. It can also be used to explore Mars past climates. Moreover the outputs of the GCM are available to the community and to engineers through the Mars Climate Database, a tool available on a DVD-Rom and used by more than 150 teams around the world. For all these applications, it is more important than ever that the model accurately simulates the "fundamentals" of the Martian meteorology: pressure, temperature, winds. However, several recent studies have revealed that to simulate the details of Mars meteorology one must take into account several processes previously neglected like the radiative effect of water ice clouds, complex variations in the vertical distribution of dust including the formation of detached layers of dust, complex coupling in the CO2 cycle which control the pressure cycle and the temperatures at high latitude, etc.