Simulations of idealised 3D atmospheric flows on terrestrial planets using LFRic-Atmosphere

• Main Authors: Sergeev, Denis E, Mayne, Nathan J, Bendall, Thomas, Boutle, Ian A, Brown, Alex, Kavcic, Iva, Kent, James, Kohary, Krisztian, Manners, James, Melvin, Thomas, Olivier, Enrico, Ragta, Lokesh K, Shipway, Ben J, Wakelin, Jon, Wood, Nigel, Zerroukat, Mohamed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 06-06-2023
• Subjects: Physics - Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics; Physics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2306.03614

We demonstrate that LFRic-Atmosphere, a model built using the Met Office's
GungHo dynamical core, is able to reproduce idealised large-scale atmospheric
circulation patterns specified by several widely-used benchmark recipes. This
is motivated by the rapid rate of exoplanet discovery and the ever-growing need
for numerical modelling and characterisation of their atmospheres. Here we
present LFRic-Atmosphere's results for the idealised tests imitating
circulation regimes commonly used in the exoplanet modelling community. The
benchmarks include three analytic forcing cases: the standard Held-Suarez test,
the Menou-Rauscher Earth-like test, and the Merlis-Schneider Tidally Locked
Earth test. Qualitatively, LFRic-Atmosphere agrees well with other numerical
models and shows excellent conservation properties in terms of total mass,
angular momentum and kinetic energy. We then use LFRic-Atmosphere with a more
realistic representation of physical processes (radiation, subgrid-scale
mixing, convection, clouds) by configuring it for the four TRAPPIST-1 Habitable
Atmosphere Intercomparison (THAI) scenarios. This is the first application of
LFRic-Atmosphere to a possible climate of a confirmed terrestrial exoplanet.
LFRic-Atmosphere reproduces the THAI scenarios within the spread of the
existing models across a range of key climatic variables. Our work shows that
LFRic-Atmosphere performs well in the seven benchmark tests for terrestrial
atmospheres, justifying its use in future exoplanet climate studies.