Related papers: Modeling the surface temperature of Earth-like pla…
Planetary obliquity and eccentricity influence climate by shaping the spatial and temporal patterns of stellar energy incident at a planet's surface, affecting both the annual mean climate and magnitude of seasonal variability. Previous…
Atmospheric heat redistribution shapes the remote appearance of rocky exoplanets but there is currently no easy way to predict a planet's heat redistribution from its physical properties. This paper proposes an analytical scaling theory for…
Inferring the properties of transiting exoplanet atmospheres relies on comparing models to spectroscopic observations. Atmosphere models, however, make a range of assumptions, from one-dimensional (1D, varying with altitude)…
The majority of potentially habitable exoplanets detected orbit stars cooler than the Sun, and therefore are irradiated by a stellar spectrum peaking at longer wavelengths than that incident on Earth. Here, we present results from a set of…
The atmospheres of synchronously rotating exoplanets are intrinsically three-dimensional, and fast vertical and horizontal winds are expected to mix the atmosphere, driving the chemical composition out of equilibrium. Due to the longer…
As the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres proceeds, providing insights into atmospheric chemistry and composition, a key question is how much deeper into the planet we might be able to see from its atmospheric properties alone. For…
Several different factors influence the seasonal cycle of a planet. This study uses a general circulation model and an energy balance model (EBM) to assess the parameters that govern the seasonal cycle. We define two metrics to describe the…
Convective processes are crucial in shaping exoplanetary atmospheres but are computationally expensive to simulate directly. A novel technique of simulating moist convection on tidally locked exoplanets is to use a global 3D model with a…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…
The internal thermal and magnetic evolution of rocky exoplanets is critical to their habitability. We focus on the thermal-orbital evolution of Earth-mass planets around low mass M stars whose radiative habitable zone overlaps with the…
System identification method (SIM) was used to evaluate the Earth equilibrium climate sensitivity. According to our simulations, the equilibrium climate sensitivity was found to be between 2 deg C and 7 deg C. Analysis of the changes in…
Eccentric planets may spend a significant portion of their orbits at large distances from their host stars, where low temperatures can cause atmospheric CO2 to condense out onto the surface, similar to the polar ice caps on Mars. The…
The macroturbulent atmospheric circulation of Earth-like planets mediates their equator-to-pole heat transport. For fast-rotating terrestrial planets, baroclinic instabilities in the mid-latitudes lead to turbulent eddies that act to…
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (phase 6) (CMIP6) global circulation models (GCMs) predict equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) values ranging between 1.8 and 5.7 $^\circ$C. To narrow this range, we group 38 GCMs into low, medium…
From analytical studies of tidal heating, eclipses and planetary illumination, it is clear that the exomoon habitable zone (EHZ) - the set of moon and host planet orbits that permit liquid water on an Earthlike moon's surface - is a…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
Next-generation space telescopes will observe the atmospheres of rocky planets orbiting nearby M-dwarfs. Understanding these observations will require well-developed theory in addition to numerical simulations. Here we present theoretical…
Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments with Dynamics (ROCKE-3D) is a 3-Dimensional General Circulation Model (GCM) developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies for the modeling of…
Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around very low mass stars are likely to have evolved in a very different way than solar system planets, and in particular Earth. However, because these are the first planets that are and will be…
Using a 3D general circulation model (GCM), we investigate the sensitivity of the climate of tidally-locked Earth-like exoplanets, Trappist-1e and Proxima Centauri b, to the choice of a convection parameterization. Compared to a mass-flux…