Towards a Self Consistent Model of the Thermal Structure of the Venus Atmosphere
Abstract
Nearly three decades ago, an international effort led to the adoption of the Venus International Reference Atmosphere (VIRA) was published in 1985 after the significant data returned by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Probes and the earlier Venera missions (Kliore et al., 1985). The vertical thermal structure is one component of the reference model which relied primarily on the three Pioneer Venus Small Probes, the Large Probe profiles as well as several hundred retrieved temperature profiles from the Pioneer Venus Orbiter radio occultation data collected during 1978 - 1982. Since then a huge amount of thermal structure data has been obtained from multiple instruments on ESA’s Venus Express (VEX) orbiter mission. The VEX data come from retrieval of temperature profiles from SPICAV/SOIR stellar/solar occultations, VeRa radio occultations and from the passive remote sensing by the VIRTIS instrument. The results of these three experiments vary in their intrinsic properties - altitude coverage, spatial and temporal sampling and resolution and accuracy An international team has been formed with support from the International Space Studies Institute (Bern, Switzerland) to consider the observations of the Venus atmospheric structure obtained since the data used for the COSPAR Venus International Reference Atmosphere (Kliore et al., 1985). We report on the progress made by the comparison of the newer data with VIRA model and also between different experiments where there is overlap. Kliore, A.J., V.I. Moroz, and G.M. Keating, Eds. 1985, VIRA: Venus International Reference Atmosphere, Advances in Space Research, Volume 5, Number 11, 307 pages.
- Publication:
-
40th COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014cosp...40E1829L