Climate Transition to Temperate Nightside at High Atmosphere Mass

TL;DR

This study investigates how high atmospheric nitrogen levels influence climate regimes on M-Earth-like planets, revealing a smooth transition from ice-covered to ice-free nightsides driven by heat transport, with implications for planetary habitability.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of climate transitions on high-pN2 planets, highlighting the role of water vapour advection in shifting from frozen to temperate nightside states.

Findings

Nightside transitions are smooth with no hysteresis.

Thicker atmospheres promote ice-free nightsides.

Climate regimes are sensitive to instellation, land cover, and atmosphere mass.

Abstract

Our recent work shows how M-Earth climates and transmission spectra depend on the amount of ice-free ocean on the planet's dayside and the mass of N2 in its atmosphere. M-Earths with more ice-free ocean and thicker atmospheres are hotter and more humid, and have larger water vapour features in their transmission spectra. In this paper, we describe a climate transition in high-pN2 simulations from the traditional ``eyeball" M-Earth climate, in which only the substellar region is temperate, to a ``temperate nightside" regime in which both the dayside and the nightside are entirely ice-free. Between these two states, there is a ``transition" regime with partial nightside ice cover. We use 3D climate simulations to describe the climate transition from frozen to deglaciated nightsides. We attribute this transition to increased advection and heat transport by water vapour in thicker atmospheres. We find that the nightside transitions smoothly back and forth between frozen and ice-free when the instellation or pCO2 is perturbed, with no hysteresis. We also find an analogous transition in colder planets: those with thin atmospheres can have a dayside hotspot when the instellation is low, whereas those with more massive atmospheres are more likely to be in the ``snowball" regime, featuring a completely frozen dayside, due to the increased advection of heat away from the substellar point. We show how both of these climate transitions are sensitive to instellation, land cover, and atmosphere mass. We generate synthetic transmission spectra and phase curves for the range of climates in our simulations.