A Two Martian Years Survey of Water Ice Clouds on Mars with ACS onboard TGO

Abstract

The middle infrared (MIR) channel of the Atmospheric Chemistry Suite (ACS) instrument onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) ESA-Roscosmos mission has performed Solar occultation measurements of the Martian atmosphere in the 2.3-4.2 $\mu$m spectral range since March 2018, which now covers two Martian Years (MY). We use the methodology previously developed for the study of the MY 34 Global Dust Storm (GDS) (Stcherbinine et al., 2020) to monitor the properties (effective radii, extinction, altitude) of the Martian water ice clouds over the first two Martian years covered by ACS-MIR. The observations encompass the period $L_s$ = 163° in MY 34 to $L_s$ = 181° in MY 36. We determine that the typical altitude of the clouds varies by 20 to 40 km between the summer and winter, with a maximum extension up to 80 km during summer in the midlatitudes. Similarly, we also note that for a limited temporal range, the altitude of the clouds also varies by 20 to 40 km between the polar regions and the midlatitudes. We also compare observations acquired during the MY 34 GDS to observations from the same period in MY 35, using that latter as a reference to characterize the effects of this GDS on the clouds' properties. In addition, we compare our retrievals with the predictions of the Mars Planetary Climate Model (PCM), which shows a reasonable agreement overall for the altitude of the clouds, although the model usually predicts lower altitudes for the top of the clouds.

References in corpus (4)

• Eight-year Climatology of Dust Optical Depth on Mars
• Dust aerosol, clouds, and the atmospheric optical depth record over 5 Mars years of the Mars Exploration Rover mission
• Martian water ice clouds during the 2018 global dust storm as observed by the ACS-MIR channel onboard the Trace Gas Orbiter
• The roles of latent heating and dust in the structure and variability of the northern Martian polar vortex

Cited by in corpus (3)

• An evidence of rapid hydrogen chloride uptake on water ice in the atmosphere of Mars
• Unambiguous detection of mesospheric CO2 clouds on Mars using 2.7 μm absorption band from the ACS/TGO solar occultations
• On the impact of the vertical structure of Martian water ice clouds on nadir atmospheric retrievals from simultaneous EMM/EXI and TGO/ACS-MIR observations