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Implicit SNAP: A New Global Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Model Designed to Study Planetary Atmospheres

Presentation #103.04 in the session “Giant Planets 2: Simulation and Lab Work”.

Published onOct 26, 2020
Implicit SNAP: A New Global Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Model Designed to Study Planetary Atmospheres

Recent observations indicate the ubiquitous existence of vertical depletion and latitudinal variations of condensable species in gas giants’ and icy giants’ atmospheres. Guillot et al. [2020], using a heuristic model, suggested that the moist convection and microphysics of condensable species can be responsible for these phenomena on Jupiter [Guillot et al., 2020, JGR 125(8): e2020JE006404]. In order to reveal the underlying mechanism behind those phenomena, we designed a global non-hydrostatic general circulation model. In this presentation, we show the test and simulation results of this nonhydrostatic global cloud-resolving model [Ge et al., 2020, ApJ, 892(2), 130]. Global nonhydrostatic models usually suffer from computational difficulties due to the large aspect ratio between the horizontal and vertical directions. To overcome this issue, we developed a vertically implicit correction (VIC) scheme in which the integration time step is no longer limited by the vertical propagation of acoustic waves. First, by showing the validation results against a hierarchy of benchmark tests, we show that our model can correctly capture the convection in localized tests and large-scale circulations on Earth-like planet and exoplanets. Finally, we present the simulation results of the vertical depletion of NH3 in Jupiter’s atmosphere and CH4 and H2S in the Icy Giants’ atmospheres. We also compare the simulation results to observations and the results from thermal equilibrium models. The simulation results indicate our model can shed light on complex phenomena in planetary and exoplanetary atmospheres.

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