The Mars Climate Database (MCD) is a database of statistics describing the climate and environment of the Martian atmosphere. It is constructed directly on the basis of output from mulitannual integrations of a Global Climate Model (GCM) developed by Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique du CNRS, France in collaboration with the University of Oxford, UK, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, Spain, SA, France with support from the European Space Agency (ESA) and Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES).
The MCD can be used as a tool for mission planning and is applied to prepare for many missions in Europe and the USA. It also provides useful predictions for any scientist or mission design specialists
Previous versions of the Mars Climate Database has been available to the
community since 1999. For intensive use, it can be provided on a DVD ROM
along with access software in Fortran, with interface for IDL, mathlab
or C.
This DVD version have been used by more than 60
teams around the word to prepare most martian missions, analyse data
from many instruments around Mars, or many other studies.
Why a model-based climate database ?
The Martian environment is highly
variable. In spite of the new observations available from Mars Global
Surveyor and now, Mars Express, it remains difficult to predict what are
the climatic conditions on Mars at any time and any locations from the
available observational data, especially for climate variables which are
not directly observed, like the wind, the water vapor mixing ratio,
atmospheric composition, etc...
The Mars GCMs have been extensively validated using available
observational data and we believe that they represent the current best
knowledge of the state of the Martian atmosphere given the observations
and the physical laws which govern the atmospheric environment and surface
conditions on the planet. In other words, Models can be used to
extrapolate the observations.
Contents.
The MCD contains simulated data (temperature, wind, density, pressure,
radiative fluxes, etc. See Table 1)
stored on a
longitude-latitude grid
from the surface up to an approximate altitude of 250 km:
Fields are averaged and stored 12 times a day, for 12 Martian
``seasons''
to give a comprehensive representation of the annual and diurnal
cycles.
Each season covers 30
in solar longitude (
), and are typically
50-70 days long.
In other words, at every grid-point,
the database contains 12 "typical" days, one for each season. In
addition, information on the variability of the data within one season
and the day to day oscillations are also stored in the database.
Vertical coordinate
The data have been interpolated to 3 kinds of vertical coordinate :