The THOR + HELIOS general circulation model: multiwavelength radiative transfer with accurate scattering by clouds/hazes
Abstract
General circulation models (GCMs) provide context for interpreting multiwavelength, multiphase data of the atmospheres of tidally locked exoplanets. In the current study, the non-hydrostatic THOR GCM is coupled with the HELIOS radiative transfer solver for the first time, supported by an equilibrium chemistry solver (FastChem), opacity calculator (HELIOS-K), and Mie scattering code (LX-MIE). To accurately treat the scattering of radiation by medium-sized to large aerosols/condensates, improved two-stream radiative transfer is implemented within a GCM for the first time. Multiple scattering is implemented using a Thomas algorithm formulation of the two-stream flux solutions, which decreases the computational time by about 2 orders of magnitude compared to the iterative method used in past versions of HELIOS. As a case study, we present four GCMs of the hot Jupiter WASP-43b, where we compare the temperature, velocity, entropy, and streamfunction, as well as the synthetic spectra and phase curves, of runs using regular versus improved two-stream radiative transfer and isothermal versus non-isothermal layers. While the global climate is qualitatively robust, the synthetic spectra and phase curves are sensitive to these details. A THOR + HELIOS WASP-43b GCM (horizontal resolution of about 4 deg on the sphere and with 40 radial points) with multiwavelength radiative transfer (30 k-table bins) running for 3000 Earth days (864 000 time-steps) takes about 19-26 d to complete depending on the type of GPU.
- Publication:
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- May 2022
- DOI:
- 10.1093/mnras/stac680
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2203.02293
- Bibcode:
- 2022MNRAS.512.3759D
- Keywords:
-
- planets and satellites: atmospheres;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 31 pages, 24 figures, accepted for publication at MNRAS