Climate diversity in the solar-like habitable zone due to varying background gas pressure

Paradise, Adiv; Fan, Bo Lin; Menou, Kristen; Lee, Christopher

doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2020.114301

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 77 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We therefore modified PlaSim's radiation model to introduce a dependence on atmospheric mass. We describe these modifications in more detail in another study (Paradise et al 2021b), but give a summary here. Rather than optical depth 𝜏 or transmittance 𝑇, which can be reasonably easily scaled with atmospheric mass, PlaSim's radiation model computes the reflectance 𝑅 of an atmospheric layer due to scattering.…”

Section: Climate Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This modified scheme produces the same amount of scattering in the limit of Earth's atmosphere, and produces top-of-atmosphere fluxes that scale similarly to those computed with SBDART for atmospheric columns of varying masses, as described in Paradise et al (2021b). We also slightly modified PlaSim's vertical discretization.…”

Section: Climate Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We included spectra for the models in the Earth-like pN 2 grid we described in Paradise et al (2021b), specifically Figure 2. In these models, we varied pN 2 from 0.1 atm to 10 atm and instellation from 1100 to 1550 W/m 2 , using Earth-like land and obliquity, to include the effects of varying amounts of Rayleigh scattering and the range of climates found at different background gas pressures.…”

Section: Modeling Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Among planets with more-temperate climates, they might be relatively dry (Abe et al 2011), entirely water-covered (Kite & Ford 2018), mostly frozen (Paradise & Menou 2017), be tidallylocked (Pierrehumbert 2011), or their atmosphere may have a very different mean molecular weight (Koll & Cronin 2019). Other factors such as obliquity (Williams & Kasting 1997), eccentricity (Bolmont et al 2016), atmospheric mass (Vladilo et al 2013;Paradise et al 2021b), the volcanic outgassing rate (Walker et al 1981), plate tectonics (Foley 2019), and rotation rate (Abbot et al 2018) can all affect the climates found in the habitable zone. Any inference technique that aims to be able to robustly separate temperate, habitable Earth-like climates from other climates must therefore contend with ★ E-mail: paradise@astro.utoronto.ca the possibility that all possible climates have not yet been explored, and a climate may exist which confounds that technique.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Fundamental Challenges to Remote Sensing of Exo-Earths

Paradise,

Menou,

Lee

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Inferring the climate and surface conditions of terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone is a major goal for the field of exoplanet science. This pursuit will require both statistical analyses of the population of habitable planets as well as in-depth analyses of the climates of individual planets. Given the close relationship between habitability and surface liquid water, it is important to ask whether the fraction of a planet's surface where water can be a liquid, 𝜒 hab , can be inferred from observations. We have produced a diverse bank of 1,874 3D climate models and computed the full-phase reflectance and emission spectrum for each model to investigate whether surface climate inference is feasible with high-quality direct imaging or secondary eclipse spectroscopy. These models represent the outcome of approximately 200,000 total simulated years of climate and over 50,000 CPU-hours, and the roughly-100 GB model bank and its associated spectra are being made publicly-available for community use. We find that there are correlations between spectra and 𝜒 hab that will permit statistical approaches. However, spectral degeneracies in the climate observables produced by our model bank indicate that inference of individual climates is likely to be model-dependent, and inference will likely be impossible without exhaustive explorations of the climate parameter space. The diversity of potential climates on habitable planets therefore poses fundamental challenges to remote sensing efforts targeting exo-Earths.

show abstract

Section: Climate Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Climate Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modeling Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Fundamental Challenges to Remote Sensing of Exo-Earths

Paradise,

Menou,

Lee

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…1,2,4,6,9,10,12]. We have modified the model to expand the range of planets that can be modeled to include planets with surface pressures significantly different from Earth's [8,7]. The modified model is available at AP's github at https://github.com/alphaparrot/ExoPlaSim [7].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Large Repository of 3D Climate Model Outputs for Community Analysis and Postprocessing

Paradise,

Fan,

Macdonald

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As the number of known exoplanets has climbed into the thousands, efforts by theorists to understand the diversity of climates that may exist on terrestrial planets in the habitable zone have also accelerated. These efforts have ranged from analytical, to simple 0-D, 1-D, and 2-D models, to highly-sophisticated 3D global climate models (GCMs) adapted from Earth climate and weather models. The advantage of the latter is that fewer physical processes are reduced to simple parameterizations and empirical fits, and may instead be represented by physically-motivated algorithms. However, many such models are difficult to use, and take a long time to reach a converged state relative to simpler models, thereby limiting the amount of parameter space that can be explored. We use PlaSim, a 3D climate model of intermediate complexity, to bridge this gap, allowing us to produce hundreds to thousands of model outputs that have reached energy balance equilibrium at the surface and top of the atmosphere. We are making our model outputs available to the community in a permanent Dataverse repository (https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/kmenou). A subset of our model outputs can be used directly with external spectral postprocessing tools, and we have used them with petitRADTRANS and SBDART in order to create synthetic observables representative of fully-3D climates. Another natural use of this repository will be to use more-sophisticated GCMs to cross-check and verify PlaSim's results, and to explore in more detail those regions of the exoplanet parameter space identified in our PlaSim results as being of particular interest. We will continue to add models to this repository in the future, including more than

show abstract

Smaller Sensitivity of Precipitation to Surface Temperature Under Massive Atmospheres

Xiong

Yang

Liu

2022

Geophysical Research Letters

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Precipitation and its response to forcing is an important aspect of planetary climate system. In this study, we examine the strength of precipitation in the experiments with different atmospheric masses and their response to surface warming, using three global atmospheric general circulation models and one regional cloud‐resolving model. We find that precipitation is weaker when atmospheric mass is larger for a given surface temperature. Furthermore, the increasing rate of precipitation with increasing surface temperature under a larger atmospheric mass is smaller than that under a smaller atmospheric mass. These behaviors can be understood based on atmospheric or surface energy balance. Atmospheric mass influences Rayleigh scattering, multiple scattering in the atmosphere, pressure broadening, lapse rate, and thereby precipitation strength. These results have important implications on the climate and habitability of early Earth, early Mars, and exoplanets with oceans.

show abstract

Climate diversity in the solar-like habitable zone due to varying background gas pressure

Cited by 13 publications

References 77 publications

Fundamental Challenges to Remote Sensing of Exo-Earths

Fundamental Challenges to Remote Sensing of Exo-Earths

A Large Repository of 3D Climate Model Outputs for Community Analysis and Postprocessing

Smaller Sensitivity of Precipitation to Surface Temperature Under Massive Atmospheres

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About