Modeling the Martian Atmosphere: The Planetary Climate Model and Mars Climate Database version 6

The last decade saw multiple in-situ and spacecraft missions scrutinizing the Martian weather and climate, from the near-surface to the exosphere. Numerical modeling remains a critical tool to tie together the various discoveries and insights gained from those space missions and many areas of improvement have been explored for Martian atmospheric models to keep up with this overarching objective.\

After several years of development, December 2022 has thus seen the release of the version 6.1 of the Mars Climate Database (MCD6.1), available at http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/. This reference database for the Martian atmospheric climatology, used by many teams and projects around the world, is derived from numerical simulations performed with the Mars Planetary Climate Model (PCM) whose development is coordinated at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD), Paris, France. This Global Climate Model enables us to simulate the general circulation all around the planet, as well as the peculiar processes that govern the evolution of the Martian atmosphere from the subsurface to the exobase, such as dust storms, clouds, waves, air-surface interactions, chemistry.\

In this presentation I will detail the main objectives in building the PCM version 6, the obstacles we faced, and the achievements of the final release that led to the MCD6.1. I will then explore the new features and results of the MCD6.1, with a focus on my main topics of research that are the dust and water cycles. These topics led me to collaborate with LASP, as the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) onboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, and several instruments from the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), allow us to constrain as never before the diurnal evolution of these aerosols. Some insights will also be given on other processes that affect the atmospheric state and can be studied through numerical modeling.

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