Addition of water and ammonia cloud microphysics to the EPIC model

Abstract

An active hydrological cycle has been added to the EPIC general circulation model (GCM) for planetary applications, with a special emphasis on Jupiter. Scientists have suspected for decades that clouds, and in particular latent heating, strongly influence Jupiter's atmospheric dynamics and this research provides a tool to investigate this phenomenon. Components of the model have been adapted for the planetary setting from recently published Earth microphysics schemes. The behavior of the cloud model is investigated in two steps. First, we explore in detail the runtime properties of a nominal model, and second, through sensitivity tests we determine how the full microphysics and selected components of the scheme affect the formation and evolution of clouds and precipitation. Results from our one-dimensional (vertical) simulations match expectations based on thermochemical models about the vertical positioning of ammonia and water clouds, and the nature of precipitation. Using (two-dimensional) meridional plane simulations, we investigate the latitudinal variation of clouds. We conclude that the zonal-wind structure under the visible cloud deck strongly affects the position of the cloud bases, also that the atmospheric dynamics modifies the resulting cloud structure that we can determine in 1D models. We describe in detail an equatorial storm system observed in our 2D simulations. We also show that simplification of our microphysics scheme would improperly simulate large-scale weather phenomena on Jupiter. We support future laboratory tests and in situ measurements that would improve the cloud parameterization scheme and would also add more constraints on the global distribution of condensibles and on the zonal wind-structure. The complete computer program resulting from this research can be downloaded as open-source software from NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) Atmospheres node.