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Convection and Clouds under Different Planetary Gravities Simulated by a Small-domain Cloud-resolving Model
- Publication Year :
- 2022
-
Abstract
- In this study, we employ a cloud-resolving model (CRM) to investigate how gravity influences convection and clouds in a small-domain (96 km by 96 km) radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE). Our experiments are performed with a horizontal grid spacing of 1 km, which can resolve large (> 1 km$^2$) convective cells. We find that under a given stellar flux, sea surface temperature increases with decreasing gravity. This is because a lower-gravity planet has larger water vapor content and more clouds, resulting in a larger clear-sky greenhouse effect and a stronger cloud warming effect in the small domain. By increasing stellar flux under different gravity values, we find that the convection shifts from a quasi-steady state to an oscillatory state. In the oscillatory state, there are convection cycles with a period of several days, comprised of a short wet phase with intense surface precipitation and a dry phase with no surface precipitation. When convection shifts to the oscillatory state, water vapor content and high-level cloud fraction increase substantially, resulting in rapid warming. After the transition to the oscillatory state, the cloud net positive radiative effect decreases with increasing stellar flux, which indicates a stabilizing climate effect. In the quasi-steady state, the atmospheric absorption features of CO$_2$ are more detectable on lower-gravity planets because of their larger atmospheric heights. While in the oscillatory state, the high-level clouds mute almost all the absorption features, making the atmospheric components hard to be characterized.<br />Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal
- Subjects :
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- arXiv
- Publication Type :
- Report
- Accession number :
- edsarx.2212.02832
- Document Type :
- Working Paper
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aca965