IA/U.Lisboa Seminar - Exploring the deep atmosphere of Venus and the interactions between surface and atmosphere - 1 março 2018

The recent missions to Venus are mostly suited to investigate the cloud region (located between 48 and 70 km altitude) and above. However, both the European Venus Express mission (that ended in December 2014) and the Japanese Akatsuki mission (that started in December 2015) have shown indications that the dynamics at the cloud top (around 70 km altitude) may be influenced by processes related to the surface-atmosphere interaction.

 

To investigate the nature of this interaction and how it may affect the atmospheric circulation all the way from the surface to 70 km altitude (and maybe above ?), we need to better understand the conditions and the circulation in the deep atmosphere, in particular in the region between surface and 10 km altitude. This region has been only sparsely investigated by probes, and only one in-situ temperature profile is available in this region. However, the IPSL Venus Global Climate Model developed by LMD and LATMOS in Paris may be used to study this question, as well as the associated mesoscale model recently developed at LMD.

 

In this presentation, I will review the available observations, and the recent works done in our team to investigate several aspects of the topic: the temperature structure in the deep atmosphere, the behavior of the planetary boundary layer and the convective activity near the surface, the generation of stationary waves and its consequences on the atmospheric circulation.

Observatório Astronómico de Lisboa (Seminar room)

Tapada da Ajuda, 1349-018 Lisboa