Related papers: Meteorology and Oceanography on a Flat Earth
According to a recent survey, 2% of the U.S. population is convinced that the earth is flat. This idea is heralded by members of the Flat Earth Society, and promulgated through Internet forums and other public media channels. Children and…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
A balanced ratio of ocean to land is believed to be essential for an Earth-like biosphere and one may conjecture that plate-tectonics planets should be similar in geological properties. After all, the volume of continental crust evolves…
Water and land surfaces on a planet interact with gases in the atmosphere and with radiation from the star. These interactions define the environments that prevail on the planet, some of which may be more amenable to prebiotic chemistry,…
Large terrestrial planets are expected to have muted topography and deep oceans, implying that most super-Earths should be entirely covered in water, so-called waterworlds. This is important because waterworlds lack a silicate weathering…
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 study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
The climate is a forced and dissipative nonlinear system featuring non-trivial dynamics of a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. The understanding of the climate's structural and multiscale properties is crucial for the provision of…
We present a large ensemble of simulations of an Earth-like world with increasing insolation and rotation rate. Unlike previous work utilizing idealized aquaplanet configurations we focus our simulations on modern Earth-like topography. The…
Current technology is not able to map the topography of rocky exoplanets, simply because the objects are too faint and far away to resolve them. Nevertheless, indirect effect of topography should be soon observable thanks to photometry…
We present simulations of atmospheres of Earth-like aquaplanets that are tidally locked to their star, that is, planets whose orbital period is equal to the rotation period about their spin axis, so that one side always faces the star and…
Physicists face major challenges in modelling multi-scale phenomena that are observed in geophysical flows (e.g. in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, or liquid planetary cores). In particular, complexities arise because geophysical fluids…
Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…
This chapter provides an overview of the basic concepts foundational to atmospheric physics and chemistry. We discuss the retention of atmospheres against thermal evaporation and the global energy balance of planets. We present simple…
Planetary obliquity (axial tilt) plays an important role in regulating the climate evolution and habitability of water-covered planets. Despite the suspicion of large obliquities in several exoplanetary systems, this phenomenon remains hard…
Every solid particle in the atmosphere, from ice crystals and pollen to dust, ash, and microplastics, is non-spherical. These particles play significant roles in Earth's climate system, influencing temperature, weather patterns, natural…
We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in exoplanet observations that will revolutionize our ability to characterize their atmospheric structure, composition, and circulation, from gas giants to rocky planets. However, exoplanet…
This article discussesl a few of the problems that arise in geophysical fluid dynamics and climate that are associated with the presence of moisture in the air, its condensation and release of latent heat. Our main focus is Earth's…
Liquid water oceans are at the center of our search for life on exoplanets because water is a strict requirement for life as we know it. However, oceans are dynamic habitats---and some oceans may be better hosts for life than others. In…
It remains to be ascertained whether sub-Neptune exoplanets primarily possess hydrogen-rich atmospheres or whether a population of H$_2$O-rich "water worlds" lurks in their midst. Addressing this question requires improved modeling of…