Climate Simulations of an Exoplanet with a Slab Ocean: A 3D Model Intercomparison of various GCMs

Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) planetary general circulation models (GCMs) have been derived from global climate models used to project 21st century changes in Earth's climate. GCMs are used to address questions regarding the climate-and habitability aspects of terrestrial planets within the solar system and assess the habitability of planets outside of the solar system, so called exoplanets. The development of GCMs has given rise to various results for concepts essential for determining potential habitable exoplanets such as the Habitable zone, hence intercomparison studies are of interest. In this project, the climate of an exoplanet with a static thermodynamic ocean will be modelled using ROCKE-3D, an open-source (3D) GCM developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This is done in order to simulate the climate and examine how the simulations compare to other GCMs. The climate simulation will also be applied to an Earth-like planet in order to determine how an Earth-like climate will impact the results. We find that the climate on a rapidly rotating Aquaplanet receiving a G-star spectral energy distribution is surprisingly Earth-like. By contributing to a higher albedo, the ocean ice fraction of a rapidly rotating Aquaplanet was shown to impact the temperature and humidity structure considerably, despite the absence of Ocean Heat Transport. However, small differences between the simulations with and without sea ice were found for a tidally locked Aquaplanet receiving a M-star spectral energy distribution, which indicates that ROCKE-3D is not shutting off sea ice properly. Generally, ROCKE-3D shows similar results as CAM4 for the G-star runs and for the M-star, ROCKE-3D shows similar results to LMDG.