Our paper on data assimilation (DA) for Mars has just been published and this week we’re also speaking about it at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. DA is a method for ‘fusing’ an atmospheric / climate model with data. If the model works well, DA allows the global extrapolation of observations that have incomplete or irregular coverage. If the model works poorly, DA provides a very efficient means of figuring out what’s wrong with the model and a framework for testing improvements. DA is widely used for Earth science for everything from recent climate reconstruction to weather forecasting. It’s only very rarely been used for other planets, though, because of the difficulty of developing and maintaining the DA capability (the software) and the computational demands. The DART DA system for Mars changes all of this by augmenting an open-source NCAR-developed DA system for planetary use. As a teaser, here’s an incomprehensible but colourful figure from the paper

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The Mars Science Laboratory was injected into interplanetary cruise just a few moments ago (early morning PST, Nov 26).  Next stop will be Mars in August 2012.  This is the most complex landed vehicle ever sent to another planetary object. It possesses a range of sophisticated instrumentation, mostly focused on understanding the geology, geochemistry, and mineralogy of rocks in the Gale Crater landing site.  It has a few auxiliary instruments: a surface radiation detector, an active neutron subsurface sounder (which looks for subsurface ice or hydrated minerals), and a Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS).  Ashima Research has been involved with the REMS instrument as a Co-I investigator since 2004. Looking forward to doing some meteorology on Mars!

Back in June we published a paper on our successful efforts to model the way solar and thermal radiation maintain Venus’ extreme climate (you can find the paper here). We also just got word that we’ll be presenting this work at the AGU conference in December, so we thought it time to give some insight into what we’re doing.  The goal of the project was two-fold: to create a self-consistent model that could stand up against spacecraft observations (i.e. to test how well “we” – the science community and our predictive models – really understand the greenhouse effect and solar heating of the atmosphere) and to develop a baseline for faster radiative transfer models that can be used in comprehensive climate models.  Why model Venus?  It’s an extreme case, it really stretches our understanding of atmospheric and climate physics and dynamics and it provides a very extreme test of our ability to model climate.  And you all know why we might care about how well we can model climate, right?

Image from the ESA Venus Express Venus Monitoring Camera.

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Ashima Research’s marsclimatecenter.com website just had a major update, with the addition of seven years of full colour, global images of Mars.  The data were collected between 1999 and 2006 by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC).  The images were created by Huiqun Wang, our colleague at Harvard.  The website allows you to select images by Earth date (day – month – year style) and Mars date (using areocentric solar longitude and Martian year).  You can also select from northern and southern polar images, and traditional global map-style images.  To read more about the images, check out the image data set description page.  To get going browsing, selecting, and/or downloading the images, check out the image archive search tool.