Planetary Climate Dynamics

Abstract:

Brown dwarfs and directly imaged giant planets exhibit significant evidence for active atmospheric circulation, which induces a large-scale patchiness in the cloud structure that evolves significantly over time, as evidenced by infrared light curves and Doppler maps. These observations raise critical questions about the fundamental nature of the circulation, its time variability, and its overall relationship to the circulation on Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter and Saturn themselves exhibit numerous robust zonal (east–west) jet streams at the cloud level; moreover, both planets exhibit long-term stratospheric oscillations involving perturbations of zonal wind and temperature that propagate downward over time on timescales of ~4 yr (Jupiter) and ~15 yr (Saturn). These oscillations, dubbed the quasi-quadrennial oscillation (QQO) for Jupiter and the semiannual oscillation (SAO) on Saturn, are thought to be analogous to the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) on Earth, which is driven by upward propagation of equatorial waves from the troposphere. To investigate these issues, we here present global, three-dimensional, high-resolution numerical simulations of the flow in the stratified atmosphere—overlying the convective interior—of brown dwarfs and Jupiter-like planets. The effect of interior convection is parameterized by inducing small-scale, randomly varying perturbations in the radiative–convective boundary at the base of the model. Radiative damping is represented using an idealized Newtonian cooling scheme. In the simulations, the convective perturbations generate atmospheric waves and turbulence that interact with the rotation to produce numerous zonal jets. Moreover, the equatorial stratosphere exhibits stacked eastward and westward jets that migrate downward over time, exactly as occurs in the terrestrial QBO, Jovian QQO, and Saturnian SAO. This is the first demonstration of a QBO-like phenomenon in 3D numerical simulations of a giant planet.

Abstract:

Shadowing trajectories are model trajectories consistent with a sequence of observations of a system, given a distribution of observational noise. The existence of such trajectories is a desirable property of any forecast model. Gradient descent of indeterminism is a well-established technique for finding shadowing trajectories in low-dimensional analytical systems. Here we apply it to the thermally-driven rotating annulus, a laboratory experiment intermediate in model complexity and physical idealisation between analytical systems and global, comprehensive atmospheric models. We work in the perfect model scenario using the MORALS model to generate a sequence of noisy observations in a chaotic flow regime. We demonstrate that the gradient descent technique recovers a pseudo-orbit of model states significantly closer to a model trajectory than the initial sequence. Gradient-free descent is used, where the adjoint model is set to $\lambda$I in the absence of a full adjoint model. The indeterminism of the pseudo-orbit falls by two orders of magnitude during the descent, but we find that the distance between the pseudo-orbit and the initial, true, model trajectory reaches a minimum and then diverges from truth. We attribute this to the use of the $\lambda$-adjoint, which is well suited to noise reduction but not to finely-tuned convergence towards a model trajectory. We find that $\lambda=0.25$ gives optimal results, and that candidate model trajectories begun from this pseudo-orbit shadow the observations for up to 80 s, about the length of the longest timescale of the system, and similar to expected shadowing times based on the distance between the pseudo-orbit and the truth. There is great potential for using this method with real laboratory data.

Abstract:

© 2019, © 2019 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. To halt global warming, the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human activities such as fossil fuel burning, cement production, and deforestation needs to be brought all the way to zero. The longer it takes to do so, the hotter the world will get. Lack of progress towards decarbonization has created justifiable panic about the climate crisis. This has led to an intensified interest in technological climate interventions that involve increasing the reflection of sunlight to space by injecting substances into the stratosphere which lead to the formation of highly reflective particles. When first suggested, such albedo modification schemes were introduced as a “Plan B,” in case the world economy fails to decarbonize, and this scenario has dominated much of the public perception of albedo modification as a savior waiting in the wings to protect the world against massive climate change arising from a failure to decarbonize. But because of the mismatch between the millennial persistence time of carbon dioxide and the sub-decadal persistence of stratospheric particles, albedo modification can never safely play more than a very minor role in the portfolio of solutions. There is simply no substitute for decarbonization.

Abstract:

AbstractWe report the results of a study of the Fukang pallasite that includes measurements of bulk composition, mineral chemistry, mineral structure, and petrology. Fukang is a Main‐group pallasite that consists of semiangular olivine grains (Fo 86.3) embedded in an Fe‐Ni matrix with 9–10 wt% Ni and low‐Ir (45 ppb). Olivine grains sometimes occur in large clusters up to 11 cm across. The Fe‐Ni phase is primarily kamacite with accessory taenite and plessite. Minor phases include schreibersite, chromite, merrillite, troilite, and low‐Ca pyroxene. We describe a variety of silicate inclusions enclosed in olivine that contain phases rarely or not previously reported in Main‐group pallasites, including clinopyroxene (augite), tridymite, K‐rich felsic glass, and an unknown Ca‐Cr silicate. Pressure constraints determined from tridymite (<0.4 GPa), two‐pyroxene barometry (0.39 ± 0.07 GPa), and geophysical calculations that assume pallasite formation at the core–mantle boundary (CMB), provide an upper estimate on the size of the Main‐group parent body from which Fukang originated. We conclude that Fukang originated at the CMB of a large differentiated planetesimal 400–680 km in radius.

Abstract:

A Martian semiannual oscillation (SAO), similar to that in the Earths tropical stratosphere, is evident in the Mars Analysis Correction Data Assimilation reanalysis dataset (MACDA) version 1.0, not only in the tropics, but also extending to higher latitudes. Unlike on Earth, the Martian SAO is found not always to reverse its zonal wind direction, but only manifests itself as a deceleration of the dominant wind at certain pressure levels and latitudes. Singular System Analysis (SSA) is further applied on the zonal-mean zonal wind in different latitude bands to reveal the characteristics of SAO phenomena at different latitudes. The second pair of principal components (PCs) is usually dominated by a SAO signal, though the SAO signal can be strong enough to manifest itself also in the first pair of PCs. An analysis of terms in the Transformed Eulerian Mean equation (TEM) is applied in the tropics to further elucidate the forcing processes driving the tendency of the zonal-mean zonal wind. The zonal-mean meridional advection is found to correlate strongly with the observed oscillations of zonal-mean zonal wind, and supplies the majority of the westward (retrograde) forcing in the SAO cycle. The forcing due to various non-zonal waves supplies forcing to the zonal-mean zonal wind that is nearly the opposite of the forcing due to meridional advection above ∼3 Pa altitude, but it also partly supports the SAO between 40 Pa and 3 Pa. Some distinctive features occurring during the period of the Mars year (MY) 25 global-scale dust storm (GDS) are also notable in our diagnostic results with substantially stronger values of eastward and westward momentum in the second half of MY 25 and stronger forcing due to vertical advection, transient waves and thermal tides