1/13/2020

The weather of Mars exhibits features both familiar and alien to those on earth: traveling weather systems with cold fronts; water ice and CO2 ice clouds and caps; thermal tides; topographic flows; dust devils, regional, and global dust storms. The Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and other spacecraft provide over a decade of observations of atmospheric conditions. Combining these data with a Mars Global Climate Model (MGCM) using the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter data (LETKF) assimilation system produces an atmospheric reanalysis: a comprehensive gridded dataset of hourly weather conditions and their uncertainties over 8+ Martian years. The Ensemble Mars Atmosphere Reanalysis System (EMARS) is then used to examine atmospheric temperatures and circulation, traveling weather systems, predictability and dynamical instabilities, and aerosol distributions and dust storms.