Patchy Nightside Clouds on Ultra-hot Jupiters: General Circulation Model Simulations with Radiatively Active Cloud Tracers
Patchy Nightside Clouds on Ultra-hot Jupiters: General Circulation Model Simulations with Radiatively Active Cloud Tracers
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Date
2022-07-20
Authors
Komacek, Thaddeus
Tan, Xianyu
Gao, Peter
Lee, Elspeth
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Komacek & Tan, Gao & Lee (2022), The Astrophysical Journal, 934:79 (31 pp), 2022 July 20
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Abstract
The atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters have been characterized in detail through recent phase curve and low- and
high-resolution emission and transmission spectroscopic observations. Previous numerical studies have analyzed
the effect of the localized recombination of hydrogen on the atmospheric dynamics and heat transport of ultra-hot
Jupiters, finding that hydrogen dissociation and recombination lead to a reduction in the day-to-night contrasts of
ultra-hot Jupiters relative to previous expectations. In this work, we add to previous efforts by also considering the
localized condensation of clouds in the atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters, their resulting transport by the
atmospheric circulation, and the radiative feedback of clouds on the atmospheric dynamics. To do so, we include
radiatively active cloud tracers into the existing MITgcm framework for simulating the atmospheric dynamics of
ultra-hot Jupiters. We take cloud condensate properties appropriate for the high-temperature condensate corundum
from CARMA cloud microphysics models. We conduct a suite of general circulation model (GCM) simulations with
varying cloud microphysical and radiative properties, and we find that partial cloud coverage is a ubiquitous
outcome of our simulations. This patchy cloud distribution is inherently set by atmospheric dynamics in addition to
equilibrium cloud condensation, and causes a cloud greenhouse effect that warms the atmosphere below the cloud
deck. Nightside clouds are further sequestered at depth due to a dynamically induced high-altitude thermal
inversion. We post-process our GCMs with the Monte Carlo radiative transfer code gCMCRT and find that the
patchy clouds on ultra-hot Jupiters do not significantly impact transmission spectra but can affect their phase-dependent
emission spectra.
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CC0 1.0 Universal
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http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/