Week 6: Too Many Nights (feat. Don Toliver & with Future)

Hope everyone had a wonderful and restful Spring Break week!

Welcome back to my blog where I track my progress on simulating exoplanets. As a recap, last-last week I demonstrated Rayleigh scattering and generated spectra for the fully saturated cloudy condition of Trappist-1e. These past couple weeks, I worked to adjust the water content of the planet to a more reasonable quantity and FINALLY created accurate cloud-coverage simulations! Which is a lot more exciting than it sounds. Let’s get into it.

Point blank, the parameter I used, relative humidity, is the wrong parameter for this general circulation model (GCM) file. There are three types of humidity: absolute humidity, relative humidity, and special humidity. Rather than relative humidity, special humidity would have made calculations accurate within the Planetary Spectrum Generator (PSG) system.

Relative humidity is the ratio of the water vapor content in the air to the water vapor content the air could potentially contain at a given temperature, while special humidity is the ratio of the mass of water vapor in a container/section of the atmosphere to the mass of dry air in that same section. These parameters are very different, resulting in faulty images for conditions that include the atmosphere. Thankfully it was only a problem with the GCM translation, and all the image simulation code still worked perfectly. So after a day of exasperation generating the GCM, I calmly returned to depriving my laptop of sleep and running new simulations.

Worry not, there is an image-reveal at the end of my spiel this week. SO KEEP READING. OR ELSE. If you need a breather, pretend this is an intermission at the theater, refill your popcorn, and return.

So now that I have accurate full-saturation cloudy conditions, I’m able to create accurate cloud maps by combining the “yes atmosphere, no clouds” simulation with the “yes atmosphere, yes clouds” simulation. Now say that three times fast 😉.

Without further ado, I present the final cloudy combination simulation. From left to right: Yes atmosphere, no clouds; Yes atmosphere, yes clouds; Special Humidity map; and last but not least, the WOMBO-COMBO!!!!

Since this blog is already technical as it is, I’ll explain the math behind the combination simulation next week, so stay tuned.

Yearn yap yawn,
Tanvi 😐