Martian Climate Database Documentation

What Climate and Meteorology are there on Mars?

Just like on the Earth, there are winds and clouds on Mars...but also CO2 snow, dust storms and other exotic meteorological events!
Mars' atmosphere is a complete and complex system, governed by specific physical, dynamical and chemical processes, which can be observed and understood.
The diurnal and seasonal cycles, combined to extreme and diversified topography, make the red planet's climate quite variable in space and time.
These variations can be modelled and predicted, and this is what the Mars Climate Database is about.
Mars Global Surveyor MOC wide angle camera mozaic displaying water ice clouds, from JPL.

What is the Mars Climate Database?

The Mars Climate Database (MCD) aims at providing scientists, engineers and enthusiasts with a realistic and reliable modelisation of the martian climatological system.
The MCD is a database of meteorological fields derived from General Circulation Model (GCM) numerical simulations of the Martian atmosphere and validated using available observational data.
The GCM is developed at Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique du CNRS (Paris, France) in collaboration with the Open University (UK), the Oxford University (UK) and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (Spain) with support from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES).
The MCD is freely distributed and intended to be useful and used in the framework of engineering applications as well as in the context of scientific studies which require accurate knowledge of the state of the Martian atmosphere.
Water ice column, extracted from the Mars Climate Database.

How to cite the Mars Climate Database ? (click to expand/fold section)


What are the Dust and Solar Extreme UV scenarios? (click to expand/fold section)


How does the MCD interpolate to high resolution topography? (click to expand/fold section)


What's more in the full version of the MCD? (click to expand/fold section)


Complete documentation of the MCD (click to expand/fold section)


How does the LMD Global Climate Model (GCM) work? (click to expand/fold section)



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