Assimilating and Modeling Dust Transport in the Martian Climate System

A meteorological data assimilation system has been developed recently for analyzing measurements of temperature and dust opacity on Mars and has been successfully applied in several studies (e.g. Montabone et al. 2005, Lewis et al. 2007) to study various atmospheric phenomena. A more sophisticated data assimilation system, now with full dust transport incorporated, is becoming available to represent more accurately and realistically the physical transport of dust.