Inner Edge of Habitable Zones for Earth-sized Planets with Various Surface Water Distributions

TL;DR

This study systematically investigates how different surface water distributions on Earth-sized planets affect the runaway greenhouse threshold, revealing that water distribution significantly influences planetary habitability limits.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of various surface water distributions on the runaway threshold using a 3D atmosphere model, highlighting the variability beyond previous zonal uniform assumptions.

Findings

Runaway threshold increases with dry surface area, from ~130% to ~155% S0.

Land-planet regimes have lower thresholds than previously estimated.

Thresholds are similar across different planetary topographies, around 10% ocean coverage.

Abstract

When planets receive insolation above a certain critical value called the runaway threshold, liquid surface water vaporizes completely, which forms the inner edge of the habitable zone. Because land planets can emit a large amount of radiation from the dry tropics, they have a higher runaway threshold than aqua planets do. Here we systematically investigated the runaway threshold for various surface water distributions using a three-dimensional dynamic atmosphere model. The runaway threshold for the meridionally uniform surface water distribution increases from the typical value for the aqua-planet regime (~130% S0) to one for the land-planet regime (~155% S0) as the dry surface area increases, where S0 is the present Earth's insolation. Although this result is similar to the previous work considering zonally uniform surface water distributions, the runaway threshold for the land-planet regime is quite low compared to that of the previous work. This is because a part of the tropical atmosphere is always wet for the meridionally uniform case. We also considered the surface water distributions determined by the Earth's, Mars' and Venus' topographies. We found that their runaway thresholds are close to that for the meridionally uniform cases, and the amount of water at the boundary between an aqua- and land-planet regime is around 10% of the Earth's ocean. This clearly shows that the runaway threshold is not determined uniquely by the luminosity of the central star, but it has a wide range caused by the surface water distribution of the terrestrial water planet itself.