Overview of the Mars PCM

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The Mars PCM

In a nutshell, the Mars Planetary Climate Model is a General Circulation Model (GCM) of the Martian atmosphere. It is in fact a suite of models which may be run in various configurations: with the historical lon-lat (LMDZ) dynamics, or the modern DYNAMICO (icosahedral grid) dynamics, or as a regional model using WRF (a limited area dynamical core), or even as a 1D (single column) model.

Reference Versions of the Mars PCM

In practice the model is most often run using the legacy LMDZ lon-lat global dynamics for 3D simulations. However within this setup there are various configurations or versions of the model that can be used. Note that some bundles containing reference datasets for the versions mentioned hereafter can be found here: https://web.lmd.jussieu.fr/~lmdz/planets/mars/

GCM version 5

This is the version of the model that was used to generate Mars Climate Database version 5.3. In practice, the main features of these simulations are:

  • a horizontal grid (longitudexlatitude) resolution of 64x48, with 49 vertical layers (when including the thermosphere)
  • a dust cycle where column dust opacity is imposed via input dust scenarios.

GCM version 6

This is the latest version of the model that was used to generate Mars Climate Database version 6.1. In practice, the main features of these simulations are:

  • a horizontal grid (longitudexlatitude) resolution of 64x48, with 73 vertical layers (when including the thermosphere)
  • a dust cycle where column dust opacity is not rescaled to but driven by dust scenarios, via injection of rocket dust storms and the use of mountain slope dust re-injection parametrization. A dedicated page on the dust cycle in version 6 can be found here.

Getting started

Most likely you will want to install and run the model, then you should start with this page. You can also check the User Manual provided with the source code (in the LMDZ.MARS directory), a copy is available online https://trac.lmd.jussieu.fr/Planeto/browser/trunk/LMDZ.MARS/user_manual.pdf, and also the "Getting Help" page on this wiki.

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