Climate Simulations of an Exoplanet with a Slab Ocean: A 3D Model Intercomparison of various GCMs

Three-dimensional (3D) planetary general circulation models (GCMs) have been derived from global climate models used to project 21st century changes in Earth's climate. GCMs are used to address questions regarding the climate-and habitability aspects of terrestrial planets within the solar syst...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Biserud, Moa
Format: Bachelor Thesis
Language:English
Published: Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för fysik och astronomi 2022
Subjects:
GCM
Online Access:http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-480146
Description
Summary:Three-dimensional (3D) planetary general circulation models (GCMs) have been derived from global climate models used to project 21st century changes in Earth's climate. GCMs are used to address questions regarding the climate-and habitability aspects of terrestrial planets within the solar system and assess the habitability of planets outside of the solar system, so called exoplanets. The development of GCMs has given rise to various results for concepts essential for determining potential habitable exoplanets such as the Habitable zone, hence intercomparison studies are of interest. In this project, the climate of an exoplanet with a static thermodynamic ocean will be modelled using ROCKE-3D, an open-source (3D) GCM developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This is done in order to simulate the climate and examine how the simulations compare to other GCMs. The climate simulation will also be applied to an Earth-like planet in order to determine how an Earth-like climate will impact the results. We find that the climate on a rapidly rotating Aquaplanet receiving a G-star spectral energy distribution is surprisingly Earth-like. By contributing to a higher albedo, the ocean ice fraction of a rapidly rotating Aquaplanet was shown to impact the temperature and humidity structure considerably, despite the absence of Ocean Heat Transport. However, small differences between the simulations with and without sea ice were found for a tidally locked Aquaplanet receiving a M-star spectral energy distribution, which indicates that ROCKE-3D is not shutting off sea ice properly. Generally, ROCKE-3D shows similar results as CAM4 for the G-star runs and for the M-star, ROCKE-3D shows similar results to LMDG. Tredimensionella (3D) planetariska allmänna cirkulationsmodeller (GCM) har härletts från de globala klimatmodeller som används för att projicera 2000-talets förändringar i jordens klimat. GCM används för att bemöta frågor om klimat- och beboelighetsaspekter av jordlika planeter inom solsystemet och bedöma ...