Meteorological pressure at Gale crater from a comparison of REMS/MSL data and MCD modelling: Effect of dust storms

Abstract

We examine the record of atmospheric pressure in Gale crater measured in-situ by the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) instrument (Gómez-Elvira et al., 2012) on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover over two Martian years. We compare the data with pressure predictions from the Mars Climate Database (MCD) (Forget et al., 1999; Millour et al., 2015) version 5.2, which is a climatological database derived from numerical simulations of the Martian atmosphere produced by a General Circulation Model run over several Martian years. Seasonal and daily trends in pressure data from REMS are well reproduced by the standard climatology of the MCD using its high resolution mode. This high-resolution mode extrapolates pressure values from the nominal model into the altitude of each location using a high-resolution topography model and a fine tuning of the vertical scale height that was chosen to mimic effects of slope winds not directly accounted for in the General Circulation Model on which the MCD is based. Differences between the synthetic MCD pressure data and the REMS measurements are produced by meteorological features that are identified on particular groups of sols and quantified in intensity. We show that regional dust storms outside Gale crater and dust abundance at the crater are important factors in the behaviour of the pressure exciting larger amplitudes on the daily pressure variations and causing most of the largest REMS-MCD differences. We compare the pressure signals with published data of the dust optical depth obtained by the REMS ultraviolet photodiodes and the Mastcam instrument on MSL, and with orbital images of the planet acquired by the MARCI instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). We show that in some cases regional dust storms induce a characteristic signature in the surface pressure measured by REMS several sols before the dust arrives to Gale crater. We explore the capability of daily pressure measurements to serve as a fast detector of the development of dust storms in the context of the MSL, Insight and Mars 2020 missions.