Atmospheric Chemistry tagged posts

Long-term studies of ozone and water vapor in the atmosphere of Mars could lead to better understanding of atmospheric chemistry for the Earth. A new analysis of data from ESA’s Mars Express mission has revealed that our knowledge of the way these atmospheric gases interact with each other is incomplete.

Using four martian years of observations from the SPICAM (Spectroscopy for the Investigation of the Characteristics of the Atmosphere of Mars) instrument, which corresponds to seven and a half Earth years, a team of researchers from Europe and Russia uncovered the gap in our knowledge when trying to reproduce their data with a global climate model of Mars.

Ozone and water vapor do not make good atmospheric companions...

Titan’s winter polar vortex imaged by the Cassini Spacecraft’s ISS camera. The vortex is now in deep winter and can only be seen because the polar clouds within the vortex extend high above Titan’s surface into the sunlight. The vortex was extremely cold from 2012-2015 giving rise to unusual nitrile ice clouds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Jason Major

A new study led by a University of Bristol earth scientist has shown that recently reported unexpected behaviour on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is due to its unique atmospheric chemistry. Titan’s polar atmosphere recently experiences and unexpected and significant cooling, contrary to all model predictions and differing from the behaviour of all other terrestrial planets in our solar system.

Titan is the largest moo...

Plots of velocity perturbations (arrows) and h v (contours) for steady-state hydrodynamic systems in full spherical geometry for l = m = 1 in the rapidly rotating limit. All quantities are computed in terms of an arbitrary velocity normalization (v0). Bright and dark colors correspond to positive and negative height perturbations, respectively. (A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.)

Normally computers speed up calculations. But with his new pen-and-paper formula Kevin Heng of the University of Bern, Switzerland, gets his results thousands of times faster than using conventional computer codes. The astrophysicist calculates the abundances of molecules (known as atmospheric chemistry) in exoplanetary atmospheres...