Climate, weather, and north polar observations from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Color Imager

The physics of Martian weather and climate: a review

“…These are evident in a variety of ways, including strong, travelling storm-like perturbations to surface wind, pressure and temperature (e.g. Barnes 1980Barnes , 1981, the appearance in images from Mars orbit or the Hubble Space Telescope of tenuous water ice clouds in spiral fronts (Briggs and Leovy 1974, Gierasch et al 1979, Hunt and James 1979, Malin et al 2008 and the organization of circumpolar dust storms (James et al 1999, Malin et al 2008, Cantor et al 2010. An example of the latter is graphically illustrated in figure 14, which shows a sequence of images from the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on board the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft taken roughly every 2 h during the development of an intense baroclinic cyclone wave near Mars' north polar ice cap.…”

Recent developments in planetary Aeolian studies and their terrestrial analogs

“…The spacing of large terrestrial linear dunes may reflect the average depth of the atmospheric boundary layer (Andreotti et al, 2009), which could have considerable relevance to abundant the linear dunes on Titan, but Mars appears to have a dearth of linear dunes. Global monitoring by the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) is documenting changes across the Red Planet for both climatological and meteorological studies, tracking movement of water ice and dust clouds and providing insights into the atmospheric dynamics related to dust lifting (Malin et al, 2008).…”

Ultraviolet dust aerosol properties as observed by MARCI

“…The MARCI instrument is a wide-angle, 7-color ''push-frame" imager whose overall components, capabilities, and performance (including calibration methodology) is described in great detail by Malin et al (2001Malin et al ( , 2008 and Bell et al (2009). As such, we recount briefly only the details of immediate concern to the retrievals presented in this paper.…”

“…This latter deficit is likely due to both the complexity of the SPICAM EPF (i.e., the entire spacecraft must slew to sample the desired geometry) and the long lead time present in the operations planning cycle (i.e., several months, which is the scale of the highly elevated dust loading conditions in 2007, Personal Communication, SPICAM Team, 2007. However, one possibility does exist: the use of the cross-track observation geometry present in the MRO/Mars Color Imager (MARCI; e.g., Malin et al, 2008) UV dataset. Exploiting two aspects of the surface in the UV, the low reflectivity of the surface relative to that of the atmosphere under large optical depth conditions and the modest amount of observed surface variability (McCord et al, 1971;Bell and Ansty, 2007;Perrier et al, 2006;Malin et al, 2008), one can construct an EPF-like data product that possesses the same characteristics as that of a CRISM EPF.…”

“…However, one possibility does exist: the use of the cross-track observation geometry present in the MRO/Mars Color Imager (MARCI; e.g., Malin et al, 2008) UV dataset. Exploiting two aspects of the surface in the UV, the low reflectivity of the surface relative to that of the atmosphere under large optical depth conditions and the modest amount of observed surface variability (McCord et al, 1971;Bell and Ansty, 2007;Perrier et al, 2006;Malin et al, 2008), one can construct an EPF-like data product that possesses the same characteristics as that of a CRISM EPF. Specifically, such a MARCI ''pseudo-EPF" seems to manifest the distinctly different phase angle behavior of the reflectivity from a single surface ''unit" and from an atmospheric modulation.…”