Related papers: A Fast, Semi-analytical Model for the Venusian Bin…
The current Venus climate is largely regulated by globally-covered concentrated sulfuric acid clouds from binary condensation of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and water (H2O). To understand this complicated H2SO4-H2O gas-cloud system, previous…
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…
The atmospheric circulation in Venus is well known to exhibit strong super-rotation. However, the atmospheric mechanisms responsible for the formation of this super-rotation are still not fully understood. In this work, we developed a new…
Sulfur-water chemistry plays an important role in the middle atmosphere of Venus. Ground based observations have found that simultaneously observed SO2 and H2O at ~64 km vary with time and are temporally anti-correlated. To understand these…
The atmosphere of Venus remains mysterious, with many outstanding chemical connundra. These include: the unexpected presence of ~10 ppm O2 in the cloud layers; an unknown composition of large particles in the lower cloud layers; and hard to…
Life in the clouds of Venus, if present in sufficiently high abundance, must be affecting the atmospheric chemistry. It has been proposed that abundant Venusian life could obtain energy from its environment using three possible sulfur…
The depletion of SO$_2$ and H$_2$O in and above the clouds of Venus (45 -- 65 km) cannot be explained by known gas-phase chemistry and the observed composition of the atmosphere. We apply a full-atmosphere model of Venus to investigate…
Sulfur dioxide is a radiatively and chemically important trace gas in the atmosphere of Venus and its abundance at the cloud-tops has been observed to vary on interannual to decadal timescales. This variability is thought to come from…
Venus shares many similarities with the Earth, but concomitantly, some of its features are extremely original. This is especially true for its atmosphere, where high pressures and temperatures are found at the ground level. In these…
The upper haze (UH) of Venus is variable on the order of days and it is populated by two particle modes. We use a 1D microphysics and vertical transport model based on the Community Aerosol and Radiation Model for Atmospheres to evaluate…
Observed chemical species in the Venusian mesosphere show local-time variabilities. SO2 at the cloud top exhibits two local maxima over local time, H2O at the cloud top is uniformly distributed, and CO in the upper atmosphere shows a…
The atmosphere of Venus is characterized by strong superrotation, in which the wind velocities at cloud heights are around 60 times faster than the surface rotation rate. The reasons for this strong superrotation are still not well…
We report new constraints on the vertical distribution of sulfuric acid vapor in the Venusian atmosphere, derived from a refined analysis of radio occultation (RO) data. The method estimates the power spectral density (PSD) of the received…
Compared to the diversity seen in exoplanets, Venus is a veritable astrophysical twin of the Earth, however its global cloud layer truncates features in transmission spectroscopy, masking its non-Earth-like nature. Observational indicators…
At visible wavelengths, Venus appears serene and pale-yellow, but since the 1920s, observers have noted high-contrast features in the ultraviolet. These features track the about 4-day superrotation of the upper cloud deck and vary widely…
Venus has regained attention on the international stage with the approval of three new missions by ESA and NASA. As the twin sister of Earth, Venus exhibits a distinct atmosphere, which casts a veil of mystery over the planetary evolution…
Measurements of trace-gases in planetary atmospheres help us explore chemical conditions different to those on Earth. Our nearest neighbor, Venus, has cloud decks that are temperate but hyper-acidic. We report the apparent presence of…
Venus is Earth's sister planet, with similar mass and density but an uninhabitably hot surface, an atmosphere with a water activity 50-100 times lower than anywhere on Earths' surface, and clouds believed to be made of concentrated sulfuric…
Venus is known for its extreme surface temperature and its sulfuric acid clouds. But the cloud layers on Venus have similar temperature and pressure conditions to those on the surface of Earth and are conjectured to be a possible habitat…
One of the most intriguing, long-standing questions regarding Venus' atmosphere is the origin and distribution of the unknown UV-absorber, responsible for the absorption band detected at the near-UV and blue range of Venus' spectrum. In…