Habitable Zones & Global Climate

Scaling Relations for Terrestrial Exoplanet Atmospheres from Baroclinic Criticality

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.EP
August 7, 2019
Filed under
Scaling Relations for Terrestrial Exoplanet Atmospheres from Baroclinic Criticality
Extrasolar planet
NASA

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 transport heat poleward. In this work, we derive a scaling theory for the equator-to-pole temperature contrast and bulk lapse rate of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres. This theory is built on the work of Jansen & Ferrari (2013), and determines how unstable the atmosphere is to baroclinic instability (the baroclinic “criticality”) through a balance between the baroclinic eddy heat flux and radiative heating/cooling.

We compare our scaling theory to General Circulation Model (GCM) simulations and find that the theoretical predictions for equator-to-pole temperature contrast and bulk lapse rate broadly agree with GCM experiments with varying rotation rate and surface pressure throughout the baroclincally unstable regime. Our theoretical results show that baroclinic instabilities are a strong control of heat transport in the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets, and our scalings can be used to estimate the equator-to-pole temperature contrast and bulk lapse rate of terrestrial exoplanets. These scalings can be tested by spectroscopic retrievals and full-phase light curves of terrestrial exoplanets with future space telescopes.

Thaddeus D. Komacek, Malte F. Jansen, Eric T. Wolf, Dorian S. Abbot
(Submitted on 7 Aug 2019)

Comments: Accepted at ApJ, 8 pages, 4 figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph); Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn)
Cite as: arXiv:1908.02661 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1908.02661v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Thaddeus Komacek [view email]
[v1] Wed, 7 Aug 2019 14:42:32 UTC (6,924 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02661
Astrobiology

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻