The building blocks of the Martian atmosphere: Quantifying the influence of primary processes present in Mars’ climate

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to present a configuration of the UM simulating the Martian climate and evaluate the impacts of each major climate variable present in the current Martian climate (orography, orbit, pressure and atmospheric composition and dust). This includes running the UM in a standard Martian setup and then examining the main climate processes that dictate the Martian climate through individual scenarios. These scenarios each change one variable linked to the respective process (e.g. to investigate dust, the dust properties are changed from being radiatively active to radiatively inactive), the output is then compared against the standard scenario and differences are attributed to the change of that variable. This allows the distinguishing of the exclusive influence of each variable, as any differences are a result of the alteration of that one variable. Such work is vital to quantifying how much each of the major features of the Martian climate actually affects it.