Mars_dust provides a multiannual climatology of Martian airborne dust as measured by various space missions. The retrieved column dust optical depth is mapped for each Martian year and formatted as cubes with time in the 3rd dimension. Two versions are available: irregularly gridded maps, and regular maps produced by kriging. These latter maps are used as column-integrated dust scenarios in the Mars Climate Database (MCD v5). The detailed description of the methodology and dataset can be found in: Montabone et al (2015) Icarus 251, pp. 65-95https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2014.12.034 ; Montabone et al (2020) JGR-Planets https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JE006111
The database contains some outputs of the MCD for all the scenarios
available, at different positions of latitude and longitude. These MCD
outputs are provided as Votables containing profiles of temperatures,
pressures, density and abundances of O2 and O3 for altitudes between 0
and 249.5 km from the surface.
MCD is a database of atmospheric statistics compiled from Global Climate Model (GCM) numerical simulation of Martian atmosphere (<a href=http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr>http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr</a>). The GCM computes in 3D the atmospheric circulation and climate taking into account radiative transfer through the gaseous atmospheres and the dust and ice aerosols, includes a representation of the CO2 ice condensation and sublimation on the ground and in the atmosphere, simulates the water cycle (with modelling of cloud microphysics), the dust multisize particle transport, the atmospheric composition controlled by the photochemistry and the local non-condensible gas enrichment and depletion induced by CO2 condensation and sublimation, and has been extended into the thermosphere and to model ionospheric processes (due to chemistry). The database extends up to exobase (the top of the thermosphere, roughly at 300km in altitude); in addition to statistics on temperature, wind, pressure, radiative fluxes, it provides data such as atmospheric composition (including dust water vapor and ice content) and make use of 'dust and Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) scenarios' to represent the variation of dust in the atmosphere and solar EUV conditions. User Manual of the service : <a href=http://vo.lmd.jussieu.fr:8080/MCD_VESPA_service_user_manual.pdf>User Manual of the service </a> .
The database contains profiles of atmospheric CO2 density and
temperature derived thereof, and ozone concentration profiles, all
derived from the first year(s) of SPICAM UV stellar occultation
observations (Forget et al. 2009, Lebonnois et al. 2006). The database
also includes the full dataset of four Martian years of aerosol
extinction profiles from SPICAM UV solar occultations (Määttänen et
al. 2013).
