P087-08
Using InSight Wind Data to Validate Atmospheric Models and Improve Predictions for Other Locations on Mars
Wednesday, 16 December 2020: 19:45
Virtual
Claire E Newman, Aeolis Research, Tucson, AZ, United States, Mariah MacQueen Baker, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, United States, Donald J Banfield, Cornell University, Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, Ithaca, NY, United States, Maria Banks, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, Ozgur Karatekin, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium, Sara Navarro, Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC-INTA), Instrumentation, Madrid, Spain, Jorge Pla-García, Southwest Research Institute Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, Aymeric Spiga, LMD/IPSL, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France - Institut Universitaire de France, France, Palaiseau Cedex, France, Orkun Temel, KULeuven, Institute of Astronomy, Leuven, Belgium, Daniel Viudez-Moreiras, Centro de Astrobiologia, Instituto National de Tecnica Aerospacial, Madrid, Spain and The Temperature and Wind for InSight (TWINS) Team and the InSight Science Team
Abstract:
Winds at any given location on Mars are due to a combination of multiple circulation components operating on a variety of scales, such as the global-scale Hadley circulation, large-scale thermal tides and planetary waves, and regional slope flows. These interactions vary diurnally, seasonally, and during dust storm events, and present a challenging test of how well atmospheric models represent atmospheric dynamics and parameterize physical processes. For this reason, wind data are extremely valuable for validating (i.e., testing and improving) atmospheric models. In turn, a model that reproduces the observed time series of wind data at some location is extremely valuable for both (a) interpreting the cause of diurnal, seasonal, and dust-related wind variations at that location, and (b) predicting winds at other locations and even other epochs.
By December of 2020, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) Lander should have measured near-surface wind speed and direction for more than one Mars year (roughly two Earth years), providing the most comprehensive Mars wind dataset since the Viking Lander missions and the longest continuous 1Hz-frequency wind dataset ever obtained on Mars (or any other planetary body except Earth). We will use wind data from the first Mars year of InSight operations, which included at least one regional dust storm, to validate output from the MarsWRF and MarsMPAS atmospheric models. We will demonstrate the impact of different choices of dynamical core, boundary layer scheme, method of dust forcing, etc. on results, and use our most realistic simulations to interpret the cause of observed changes in the wind pattern over the first year of observations. We will also briefly discuss how the validated models perform in simulating wind patterns at other landing sites. The figure shows InSight measured wind speeds over much of a Mars year compared with MarsWRF-predicted near-surface wind speeds at the InSight landing site, for a version of the model forced with a simple, prescribed atmospheric dust scenario.
