Mars' atmosphere: The sister planet, our statistical twin

Satellite‐based Martian reanalyses have allowed unprecedented comparisons between our atmosphere and that of our sister planet, underlining various similarities and differences in their respective dynamics. Yet by focusing on large scale structures and deterministic mechanisms they have improved our...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of geophysical research. Atmospheres 2016-10, Vol.121 (20), p.11,968-11,988
Main Authors: Chen, Wilbur, Lovejoy, Shaun, Muller, Jan‐Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Atmosphere
Dynamics
Earth
Earth atmosphere
Fluid dynamics
Geophysics
Mars
Mars (planet)
Mars atmosphere
multifractals
Planetary atmospheres
Planets
scaling
Turbulence
Turbulent flow
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Summary:Satellite‐based Martian reanalyses have allowed unprecedented comparisons between our atmosphere and that of our sister planet, underlining various similarities and differences in their respective dynamics. Yet by focusing on large scale structures and deterministic mechanisms they have improved our understanding of the dynamics only over fairly narrow ranges of (near) planetary scales. However, the Reynolds numbers of the flows on both planets are larger than 1011 and dissipation only occurs at centimetric (Mars) or millimetric scales (Earth) so that over most of their scale ranges, the dynamics are fully turbulent. In this paper, we therefore examine the high‐level, statistical, turbulent laws for the temperature, horizontal wind, and surface pressure, finding that Earth and Mars have virtually identical statistical exponents so that their statistics are very similar over wide ranges. Therefore, it would seem that with the exception of certain aspects of the largest scales (such as the role of dust in atmospheric heating on Mars, or of water in its various phases on Earth), that the nonlinear dynamics are very similar. We argue that this is a prediction of the classical laws of turbulence when extended to planetary scales and that it supports our use of turbulent laws on both planetary atmospheres. Key Points We compare the atmospheric statistics on Earth and on Mars We find that the Martian atmosphere exhibits similar scaling properties to the Earth's atmosphere We conduct a multifractal analysis and find similar results for the Martian and Earth atmospheres
ISSN:2169-897X
2169-8996
DOI:10.1002/2016JD025211