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Y. Wanherdrick, F. Forget, F. Hourdin, O. Talagrand, M. Angelats I Coll (LMD), S. Lewis, P. Read, F. Taylor (AOPP), M. Lopez Valverde, M. Lopez-Puertas (IAA), J.P. Huot (ESTEC)
For several years, a database of statistics which describes the climate and surface environment of Mars has been constructed by several European teams from LMD(France), AOPP (UK), and more recently from IAA (Spain) with the support of ESA and now CNES. The database may be used as a tool for mission planning and has already been applied to prepare many spacecraft missions in Europe and in the USA. It also provides a valuable resource for scientists looking for a good knowledge of the mean state and variability of the Martian environment. A full version of the Mars Climate Database is available for distribution on CDroms (for UNIX systems and PCs). Alternatively, access to the MCD is also possible through an interactive WWW interface: http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/.
The database is based on numerical simulations performed with state-of-the-art General Circulation Models (GCM). These models and the derived climate database are constantly improved. We report the recent release of an improved version of the database (version 3.1). This version includes the accurate surface properties measured by Mars Global surveyor as well as more realistic dust scenarios deduced from the recent spacecraft observations. The top of both the models and the database has been extended to the homopause around 120 km altitude.
We will present detailed comparisons between the model-based database predictions and the meteorology of Mars as observed by the recent spacecraft missions.
This work was funded by ESA under Contract 11369/95/NL/JG and CNES
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: yann.wanherdrick@lmd.jussieu.fr