Orateur
Description
Titan, the largest moon on Saturn, is the only moon in the Solar System to have a substantial atmosphere. It is also the only body besides Earth to have a liquid stable at its surface. For Titan, this liquid is composed of hydrocarbons, mainly methane, forming lakes and seas at the surface. The knowledge we have on Titan is based on observations from Earth, and from space missions, especially the Cassini-Huygens mission. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, providing a lot of very valuable data. Huygens was a probe, which landed on Titan on January 14th 2005, providing profiles of temperature, winds, atmospheric composition, and the first pictures from Titan’s surface.
To know more about the atmospheric circulation on Titan, and the interactions between the atmosphere and the surface, atmospheric models have been developed. Among them, the mtWRF model (mesoscale titan WRF, see Rafkin and Soto 2020), has been developed and adapted from a model used on Earth to produce weather forecasts and study the atmosphere. The mtWRF model has been used to study the atmospheric circulation around lakes on Titan (Rafkin and Soto 2020, Chatain et al. 2022, Chatain et al. 2024). Here we study the atmospheric circulation created by the lakes, and we present some results showing the effect of different surface properties (i.e. surface roughness, emissivity, albedo and thermal inertia) around small lakes (see Moisan et al. 2024 in prep). On Titan, some lakes are surrounded by sharp topographies, that we call ramparts here. We show that ramparts strongly affect the local atmospheric circulation around lakes.
We are now developing a new mesoscale model adapted to study Titan’s convective methane clouds. This new model will also come from WRF for the dynamics. For the physical part, we will use the physics modeling developed for the Titan-PCM model (formerly IPSL Titan GCM, Lebonnois et al. 2012).
Day constraints
Mercredi 28 : disponible jusqu'à 12h, puis à partir de 15h.
Jeudi 29 : disponible le matin jusqu'à 12h.
Vendredi 1er : disponible le matin jusqu'à 12h, mais je préfèrerais un autre jour (conflit avec la journée des doctorants du LMD)
| Astrophysics Field | Planetology (including small bodies and exoplanets) |
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