Related papers: NIR-Driven Moist Upper Atmospheres of Synchronousl…
The Great Oxidation Event was a period during which Earth's atmospheric oxygen (O$_2$) concentrations increased from $\sim 10^{-5}$ times its present atmospheric level (PAL) to near modern levels, marking the start of the Proterozoic…
Ganymede's atmosphere is produced by radiative interactions with its surface, sourced by the Sun and the Jovian plasma. The sputtered and thermally desorbed molecules are tracked in our Exospheric Global Model (EGM), a 3-D parallelized…
The Trappist-1 planets provide a unique opportunity to test the current understanding of rocky planet evolution. The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to characterize the atmospheres of these planets, potentially detecting CO$_2$, CO,…
Vertical mixing disrupts the thermochemical equilibrium and introduces additional heat flux that alters exoplanetary atmospheric temperatures. We investigate how this mixing-induced heat flux affects atmospheric chemistry. Temperature…
Inferences of molecular compositions of exoplanetary atmospheres have generally focused on C, H, and O-bearing molecules. Recently, additional absorption in HST WFC3 transmission spectra around 1.55$\mu$m has been attributed to…
Transiting planets provide a unique opportunity to study the atmospheres of extra-solar planets. Radiative hydrodynamical models of the atmosphere provide a crucial link between the physical characteristics of the atmosphere and the…
We present three-dimensional atmospheric circulation models of GJ 1214b, a 2.7 Earth-radius, 6.5 Earth-mass super Earth detected by the MEarth survey. Here we explore the planet's circulation as a function of atmospheric metallicity and…
The TRAPPIST-1 planets have become prime targets for studying the atmospheric and geophysical properties of planets around M-dwarf stars. To effectively identify their atmospheric composition, we first must understand their geological…
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…
We study the variability of major atmospheric absorption features in the disk-integrated spectra of the Earth with future application to Earth-analogs in mind, concentrating on the diurnal timescale. We first analyze observations of the…
It is now understood that the accretion of terrestrial planets naturally involves giant collisions, the moon-forming impact being a well known example. In the aftermath of such collisions the surface of the surviving planet is very hot and…
Water photolysis and hydrogen loss from the upper atmospheres of terrestrial planets is of fundamental importance to climate evolution but remains poorly understood in general. Here we present a range of calculations we performed to study…
Robust atmospheric and radiative transfer modeling will be required to properly interpret reflected light and thermal emission spectra of terrestrial exoplanets. This will help break observational degeneracies between the numerous…
Orbital phase-dependent variations in thermal emission and reflected stellar energy spectra can provide meaningful constraints on the climate states of terrestrial extrasolar planets orbiting M dwarf stars. Spatial distributions of water…
Most planets currently amenable to transit spectroscopy are close enough to their host star to exhibit a relatively strong day to night temperature gradient. For hot planets, this leads to cause a chemical composition dichotomy between the…
The recent detections of temperate terrestrial planets orbiting nearby stars and the promise of characterizing their atmospheres motivates a need to understand how the diversity of possible planetary parameters affects the climate of…
Robustly modeling the inner edge of the habitable zone is essential for determining the most promising potentially habitable exoplanets for atmospheric characterization. Global climate models (GCMs) have become the standard tool for…
Water, methane and carbon-monoxide are expected to be among the most abundant molecules besides molecular hydrogen in the hot atmosphere of close-in EGPs. Transit observations in the mid-IR allow the atmospheric content of transiting…
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…
Carbon dioxide is one of the major contributors to the radiative forcing, increasing both the temperature and the humidity of Earth's atmosphere. If the stellar irradiance increases and water becomes abundant in the stratosphere of an…