The roles of latent heating and dust in the structure and variability of the northern Martian polar vortex

TL;DR

This study investigates how latent heating, dust, and topography influence the structure and variability of the northern Martian polar vortex, revealing dust's dominant role in disrupting vortex stability.

Contribution

It develops a novel Martian climate model to decompose the effects of latent heat and dust, and analyzes reanalysis data to understand their impact on vortex dynamics.

Findings

High dust loading disrupts the vortex and reduces variability.

Dust and topography mainly drive eddy activity throughout the year.

Latent heat can produce an annular vortex but has minor impact on variability.

Abstract

The winter polar vortices on Mars are annular in terms of their potential vorticity (PV) structure, a phenomenon identified in observations, reanalysis and some numerical simulations. Some recent modeling studies have proposed that condensation of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the winter pole is a contributing factor to maintaining the annulus through the release of latent heat. Dust and topographic forcing are also known to be causes of internal and interannual variability in the polar vortices. However, coupling between these factors remains uncertain, and previous studies of their impact on vortex structure and variability have been largely limited to a single Martian global climate model (MGCM). Here, by further developing a novel MGCM, we decompose the relative roles of latent heat and dust as drivers for the variability and structure of the northern Martian polar vortex. We also consider how Martian topography modifies the driving response. By also analyzing a reanalysis dataset we show that there is significant dependence in the polar vortex structure and variability on the observations assimilated. In both model and reanalysis, high atmospheric dust loading (such as that seen during a global dust storm) can disrupt the vortex, cause the destruction of PV in the low-mid altitudes (> 0.1 hPa), and significantly reduce spatial and temporal vortex variability. Through our simulations, we find that the combination of dust and topography primarily drives the eddy activity throughout the Martian year, and that although latent heat release can produce an annular vortex, it has a relatively minor effect on vortex variability.