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S. Lebonnois, F. Hourdin (LMD/IPSL, Paris, France), V. Eymet, R. Fournier (Laboratoire d'Energetique, Toulouse, France), J.-L. Dufresne (LMD/IPSL, Paris, France)
The Venus-Express mission will soon be on its way to explore in depth the atmosphere of Venus. Many questions concerning the mechanisms controling this atmosphere are still open, and certainly this new mission will contribute to bring answers, while raising other puzzles.
In this context, we are developing at the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique a new General Circulation Model for the atmosphere of Venus, based on our experience with GCMs for Earth, Mars and Titan. This new 3-dimensional GCM covers altitudes from the surface up to 100 km, with a horizontal grid resolution of 48 longitudes by 32 latitudes. A new radiative transfer scheme has been developed specifically for this dense CO2 atmosphere, based on a temperature-dependent power net-exchange matrix, which is calculated using a Monte-Carlo simulation. Though this is our next step, the GCM does not yet include a self-consistent description of the clouds and of the atmospheric composition.
We present the new radiative transfer scheme, and the preliminary simulations obtained with this new GCM, mainly discussing here the super-rotation obtained, and the mechanisms that generate this circulation.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #3
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.