Related papers: Global circulation as the main source of cloud act…
The Cassini-Huygens mission measured the chemical abundances of the major components of Titan's atmosphere, and analyses of the data revealed several as-yet unexplained anomalies in the methane and hydrogen profiles. We model the…
Using an idealised climate model incorporating seasonal forcing, we investigate the impact of rotation rate on the abundance of clouds on an Earth-like aquaplanet, and the resulting impacts upon albedo and seasonality. We show that the…
Saturn's largest satellite, Titan, has stratospheric wind speeds that may be up to ~210 m/sec [1], circling Titan in about a day compared to Titan's slow 16-day rotation. Theoretical models to explain such super-rotating winds are not well…
The clouds have a great impact on Venus's energy budget and climate evolution, but its three-dimensional structure is still not well understood. Here we incorporate a simple Venus cloud physics scheme into a flexible GCM to investigate the…
Saturn's largest satellite, Titan, has a thick atmosphere dominated by nitrogen and methane. The dense orange-brown smog hiding the satellite's surface is produced by photochemical reactions of methane, nitrogen and their dissociation…
Ultra-hot Jupiters, an extreme class of planets not found in our solar system, provide a unique window into atmospheric processes. The extreme temperature contrasts between their day- and night-sides pose a fundamental climate puzzle: how…
Cloud formation and magnetic effects are both expected to significantly impact the structures and observable properties of hot Jupiter atmospheres. For some hot Jupiters, thermal ionization and condensation can coexist in a single…
Escape of an early atmosphere from Titan, during which time NH3 could be converted by photolysis into the present N2 dominated atmosphere, is an important problem in planetary science. Recently Gilliam and Lerman (2014) estimated escape…
With the discovery of ever smaller and colder exoplanets, terrestrial worlds with hazy atmospheres must be increasingly considered. Our Solar System's Titan is a prototypical hazy planet, whose atmosphere may be representative of a large…
In this article I summarize the current state of knowledge about the composition of Titan's atmosphere, and our current understanding of the suggested chemistry that leads to that observed composition. I begin with our present knowledge of…
The atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters have been characterized in detail through recent phase curve and low- and high-resolution emission and transmission spectroscopic observations. Previous numerical studies have analyzed the effect of the…
Context: Saturn's massive gravity is expected to causes a tide in Titan's atmosphere, producing a surface pressure variation through the orbit of Titan and tidal winds in the troposphere. The future Dragonfly mission could analyse this…
In hot and ultra-hot Jupiters, stellar irradiation is a primary driver of atmospheric circulation and the wave structures that sustain it. We aim to investigate how variations in radiative and dynamical timescales influence global flow…
Between 2004 and 2007 the instruments of the CASSINI spacecraft discovered hydrocarbon lakes in the polar regions of Titan. We have developed a lake-atmosphere equilibrium model allowing the determination of the chemical composition of…
Polar vortices are common planetary flows that encircle the pole in the middle or high latitudes, and are observed on most of the solar systems' planetary atmospheres. The polar vortices on Earth, Mars, and Titan are dynamically related to…
Clouds and hazes are abundant in the thin and cold atmospheres of Triton and Pluto, where they are thought to be produced by interactions between atmospheric gases and ultraviolet photons from the Sun and those scattered by the local…
Titan's northern high latitudes host many large hydrocarbon lakes. Like water lakes on Earth, Titan's lakes are constantly subject to evaporation. This process strongly affects the atmospheric methane abundance, the atmospheric temperature,…
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has many lakes on its surface, formed mainly of liquid methane. Like water lakes on Earth, these methane lakes on Titan likely profoundly affect the local climate. Previous studies (Rafkin and Soto 2020,…
We present an analysis of the VIMS solar occultations dataset, which allows us to extract vertically resolved information on the characteristics of Titan's atmosphere between 100-700 km with a characteristic vertical resolution of 10 km.…
1) The annual cycle of atmospheric methane in southern high latitudes is extremely highly correlated with Antarctic sea ice extent. 2) The annual cycle of atmospheric methane in the Arctic is highly correlated with Antarctic or Arctic plus…