Improving the parametrization of transport and mixing processes in planetary atmospheres: the importance of implementing the full Coriolis acceleration

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of implementing the full Coriolis acceleration in planetary atmospheric models to accurately simulate dynamics, instabilities, and wave interactions, especially for exoplanets with diverse conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate the full Coriolis acceleration into atmospheric models, improving the representation of turbulence and wave dynamics beyond the traditional approximation.

Findings

Full Coriolis acceleration significantly alters flow instabilities.

Wave damping and breaking are affected by the full Coriolis treatment.

Enhanced parameterization of turbulence and waves in models.

Abstract

With the ongoing characterisation of the atmospheres of exoplanets by the JWST, we are unveiling a large diversity of planetary atmospheres, both in terms of composition and dynamics. As such, it is necessary to build coherent atmospheric models for exoplanetary atmospheres to study their dynamics in any regime of thickness, stratification and rotation. However, many models only partially include the Coriolis acceleration with only taking into account the local projection of the rotation vector along the vertical direction (this is the so-called "Traditional Approximation of Rotation") and do not accurately model the effects of the rotation when it dominates the stratification. In this contribution, we report the ongoing efforts to take the full Coriolis acceleration into account for the transport of momentum and the mixing of chemicals. First, we show how the horizontal local component of the rotation vector can deeply modifies the instabilities of horizontal sheared flows and the turbulence they can trigger. Next, we show how the interaction between waves and zonal winds can be drastically modified because of the modification of the wave damping or breaking when taking into account the full Coriolis acceleration. These works are devoted to improve the parameterization of waves and turbulent processes in global atmospheric models.