The THOR+HELIOS general circulation model: multi-wavelength radiative transfer with accurate scattering by clouds/hazes

TL;DR

This paper introduces an advanced GCM coupling with multi-wavelength radiative transfer and improved scattering treatment, enabling more accurate simulations of exoplanet atmospheres like WASP-43b.

Contribution

It presents the first coupling of the THOR GCM with the HELIOS radiative transfer solver, incorporating efficient multiple scattering and a new two-stream method.

Findings

Global climate is robust to radiative transfer details.

Synthetic spectra and phase curves are sensitive to scattering treatment.

The model runs efficiently on GPUs, enabling long-term simulations.

Abstract

General circulation models (GCMs) provide context for interpreting multi-wavelength, multi-phase data of the atmospheres of tidally locked exoplanets. In the current study, the non-hydrostatic THOR GCM is coupled with the HELIOS radiative transfer solver for the first time, supported by an equilibrium chemistry solver (FastChem), opacity calculator (HELIOS-K) and Mie scattering code (LX-MIE). To accurately treat the scattering of radiation by medium-sized to large aerosols/condensates, improved two-stream radiative transfer is implemented within a GCM for the first time. Multiple scattering is implemented using a Thomas algorithm formulation of the two-stream flux solutions, which decreases the computational time by about 2 orders of magnitude compared to the iterative method used in past versions of HELIOS. As a case study, we present four GCMs of the hot Jupiter WASP-43b, where we compare the temperature, velocity, entropy, and streamfunction, as well as the synthetic spectra and phase curves, of runs using regular versus improved two-stream radiative transfer and isothermal versus non-isothermal layers. While the global climate is qualitatively robust, the synthetic spectra and phase curves are sensitive to these details. A THOR+HELIOS WASP-43b GCM (horizontal resolution of about 4 degrees on the sphere and with 40 radial points) with multi-wavelength radiative transfer (30 k-table bins) running for 3000 Earth days (864,000 time steps) takes about 19-26 days to complete depending on the type of GPU.