I thought I might share some of my research efforts again. A larger portion of my research these days is on Martian gravity waves. Earth has gravity waves, and they’re often produced by wind flow over mountains. Downwind of a mountain is where we usually see these waves. Sometimes you can notice these waves by seeing periodic cloud features downwind of a mountain.

Below I have attempted to reproduce Martian gravity waves. The image below is a vertical slice of the Martian atmosphere. Wind is moving the air from left to right. The small mountain is imposed at the center and at the bottom of the image. The whole image is 120 km across and 30 km tall. The image shows the deviation of the atmosphere in temperature from its stable state.

The initial atmosphere is all traveling at 30 m/s. Perhaps unwisely I quickly impose the mountain, setting off a shock that eventually dissipates (after reflecting off the boundaries a few times). However, you quickly will also notice the wind that initially encounters the wall is lifted, and thus adiabatically cools. This rising air will then fall, warming, producing the warmer feature behind. This process repeats, and further perturbs the atmosphere downwind (creating the repeating pattern of cool and warm air). This repeating feature are the gravity waves I intended to produce in the model.

Why do we care about gravity waves? They have the ability to alter jets and warm the atmosphere above. In the long run this helps to produce better models of the Martian atmosphere which further help with missions to Mars that use aerobraking.