ISSI working team:
Water in Mars atmosphere: Comparison of Recent Data Sets
Team leader: Oleg Korablev, Space Research Institute (IKI), Moscow
Jean-Loup Bertaux
Vittorio Formisano
Michael D. Smith
Theirry Fouchet
Dmitry Titov
Emmanuel Lellouch
Ludmila Zasova
Nikolai Ignatiev
Anna Fedorova
Franck Montmessin
Sasha Rodin
Ann Sprague
R. Todd Clancy
Therese Encrenaz
Davide Grassi
PhD students
Severine Perrier
Martin Tschimmel
Luca Maltagliati
Abstract:
Atmospheric water cycle is a
significant component of the Martian climate, which is believed to be
in large extent responsible for such features of the Martian surface as
the asymmetry of polar caps, equatorial anomalies of hydrogen content
in the regolith and peculiar morphology of the slopes of major
volcanoes. A crucial insight into the Martian water cycle may be
provided by its detailed characterization in its current state. Mars
Express, a versatile atmospheric mission, carries three instruments
capable to measure atmospheric water vapour from near-IR to thermal IR
spectral ranges. PFS covers both spectral ranges, SPICAM IR measures in
near-IR, and OMEGA contributes to the subject with spatially resolved
measurements in the near-IR, which need to be validated with the data
of two other experiments. Comparisons of data on the first Mars Express
conference at ESTEC showed a substantial disagreement among these data
sets. We intend to seek in detail the origin of the apparent
disagreement, and to understand the information present in the
different water vapour bands measured by different instruments. The
data will be compared with MGS simultaneous measurements (taken in
thermal-IR), and with ground-based monitoring sequences (microwave,
near-IR). As a result we intend to introduce necessary
corrections into the retrieval techniques used, build the MEX H2O
climatology, and to relate it to the most complete to date MGS
climatology, and to available measurements in the near IR obtained in
Viking epoch. The measurements will be compared to the most advanced
Mars Global Circulation Models involving water cycle, for improvements
of these models, and for interpolation of data into space and time
domain where observations are unavailable.
Meetings
- Meeting 1 at ISSI in Bern November 14 - November 18 2005
- Meeting 2 at ISSI in Bern (~4 days): February 21-24 2006 or March
6-9 2006
Papers
Data