Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments with Dynamics (ROCKE-3D) 1.0: A General Circulation Model for Simulating the Climates of Rocky Planets

Abstract

Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments with Dynamics(ROCKE-3D) is a 3-Dimensional General Circulation Model (GCM) developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies for the modeling of atmospheres of Solar System and exoplanetary terrestrial planets. Its parent model, known as ModelE2 (Schmidt et al. 2014), is used to simulate modern and 21st Century Earth and near-term paleo-Earth climates. ROCKE-3D is an ongoing effort to expand the capabilities of ModelE2 to handle a broader range of atmospheric conditions including higher and lower atmospheric pressures, more diverse chemistries and compositions, larger and smaller planet radii and gravity, different rotation rates (slowly rotating to more rapidly rotating than modern Earth, including synchronous rotation), diverse ocean and land distributions and topographies, and potential basic biosphere functions. The first aim of ROCKE-3D is to model planetary atmospheres on terrestrial worlds within the Solar System such as paleo-Earth, modern and paleo-Mars, paleo-Venus, and Saturn's moon Titan. By validating the model for a broad range of temperatures, pressures, and atmospheric constituents we can then expand its capabilities further to 2 those exoplanetary rocky worlds that have been discovered in the past and those to be discovered in the future. We discuss the current and near-future capabilities of ROCKE-3D as a community model for studying planetary and exoplanetary atmospheres.3

NIR-driven Moist Upper Atmospheres of Synchronously Rotating Temperate Terrestrial Exoplanets

“…We use the ROCKE-3D GCM (Way et al 2017) to obtain 3D atmospheric structures of terrestrial planets with surface water under varying irradiation, focusing on the H 2 O profile in the upper atmosphere. ROCKE-3D is a generalization of the ModelE2 GCM (Schmidt et al 2014), which has been developed for the Earth at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.…”

“…ROCKE-3D is a generalization of the ModelE2 GCM (Schmidt et al 2014), which has been developed for the Earth at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The details of the ROCKE-3D GCM are presented in Way et al (2017).…”

“…We follow the pro-1 https://code.metoffice.gov.uk/trac/socrates cedure described in Appendix B of Way et al (2017), which is briefly summarized below.…”

Venusian Habitable Climate Scenarios: Modeling Venus through time and applications to slowly rotating Venus-Like Exoplanets

“…The shallow depth reduces the time lag between solar forcing and ocean response. See Way et al (2017) Section 2.2.2 for details. In essence they stepped the sidereal rotation rate of an Earth-like world from 1 to 256 sidereal days.…”

The Impact of Planetary Rotation Rate on the Reflectance and Thermal Emission Spectrum of Terrestrial Exoplanets around Sunlike Stars

“…In fact, such a study has been considered by Jansen et al [2019] using the same GCM (Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments with Dynamics, ROCKE-3D, Way et al 2017) that we use in this study. They varied the rotation period of an Earth-like planet from 1x to 256x the sidereal day length of present Earth.…”