Simulating gas giant exoplanet atmospheres with Exo-FMS: Comparing semi-grey, picket fence and correlated-k radiative-transfer schemes

TL;DR

This paper compares three radiative transfer schemes in a GCM for hot Jupiter atmospheres, demonstrating that the picket fence approach offers a good balance of realism and simplicity, aligning well with more complex models.

Contribution

The study implements and benchmarks three RT schemes in Exo-FMS, showing the picket fence method effectively approximates real gas models in hot Jupiter simulations.

Findings

Semi-grey scheme aligns with previous studies.

Real gas model accurately reproduces temperature and dynamics.

Picket fence scheme closely matches real gas spectra.

Abstract

Radiative-transfer (RT) is a fundamental part of modelling exoplanet atmospheres with general circulation models (GCMs). An accurate RT scheme is required for estimates of the atmospheric energy transport and for gaining physical insight from model spectra. We implement three RT schemes for Exo-FMS: semi-grey, non-grey `picket fence', and real gas with correlated-k. We benchmark the Exo-FMS GCM using these RT schemes to hot Jupiter simulation results from the literature. We perform a HD 209458b-like simulation with the three schemes and compare their results. These simulations are then post-processed to compare their observable differences. The semi-grey scheme results show qualitative agreement with previous studies in line with variations seen between GCM models. The real gas model reproduces well the temperature and dynamical structures from other studies. After post-processing our non-grey picket fence scheme compares very favourably with the real gas model, producing similar transmission spectra, emission spectra and phase curve behaviours. Exo-FMS is able to reliably reproduce the essential features of contemporary GCM models in the hot gas giant regime. Our results suggest the picket fence approach offers a simple way to improve upon RT realism beyond semi-grey schemes.