Characterising The Atmospheric Dynamics Of HD209458b-like Hot Jupiters Using AI Driven Image Recognition/Categorisation

TL;DR

This study employs AI image recognition to analyze atmospheric dynamics of HD209458b-like hot Jupiters, revealing distinct regimes based on orbital radius and identifying a surprising night-side hot-spot, thus offering a computationally efficient approach for exoplanet modeling.

Contribution

Introduces a novel AI-based image classification method to analyze complex atmospheric models, reducing computational costs and uncovering new atmospheric features in exoplanet simulations.

Findings

Models with shorter orbital radii show significant global mixing.

Longer orbital radius models exhibit limited mixing, mainly at mid-pressures.

A night-side hot-spot was detected, linked to weak rotational influence.

Abstract

In-order to understand the results of recent observations of exoplanets, models have become increasingly complex. Unfortunately this increases both the computational cost and output size of said models. We intend to explore if AI-image-recognition can alleviate this burden. We used DYNAMICO to run a series of HD209458-like models with different orbital-radii. Training data for a number of features of interest was selected from the initial outputs of these models. This was used to train a pair of multi-categorisation convolutional-neural-networks (CNN), which we applied to our outer-atmosphere-equilibrated models. The features detected by our CNNs revealed that our models fall into two regimes: models with a shorter orbital-radii exhibit significant global mixing which shapes the entire atmospheres dynamics. Whereas, models with longer orbital-radii exhibit negligible mixing except at mid-pressures. Here, the initial non-detection of any trained features revealed a surprise: a night-side hot-spot. Analysis suggests that this occurs when rotational influence is sufficiently weak that divergent flows from the day-side to the night-side dominate over rotational-driven transport, such as the equatorial jet. We suggest that image-classification may play an important role in future, computational, atmospheric studies. However special care must be paid to the data feed into the model, from the colourmap, to training the CNN on features with enough breadth and complexity that the CNN can learn to detect them. However, by using preliminary-studies and prior-models, this should be more than achievable for future exascale calculations, allowing for a significant reduction in future workloads and computational resources.