Geographic control of Titan's mid-latitude clouds.

A GCM Parameterization of Ice Particle Mean Effective Sizes for High Latitude Cirrus Clouds and It's Comparison with Mid-Latitude Parmaterization

Single-scattering properties of ice clouds depend on both ice water content (IWC) and effective size of cloud particles (Fu 1996; Fu et al. 1998). However, only the IWC information is provided in numerical models. Stephens et al. (1990) showed that the ice cloud feedback on a CO2 warming simulation could be either positive or negative depending on the value of the ice particle size assumed. Par...

Clouds on Titan during the Cassini prime mission: A complete analysis of the VIMS data

We use data from the VIMS instrument on board the Cassini spacecraft to construct high sensitivity and high spatial-resolution maps of the locations of tropospheric clouds on Titan in the late northern winter season during which the Cassini prime mission took place. These observations show that, in this season, clouds on Titan are strongly hemispherically asymmetric. Mid-latitude clouds, in par...

The dynamics behind Titan's methane clouds.

We present results of an axisymmetric global circulation model of Titan with a simplified suite of atmospheric physics forced by seasonally varying insolation. The recent discovery of midlatitude tropospheric clouds on Titan has caused much excitement about the roles of surface sources of methane and the global circulation in forming clouds. Although localized surface sources, such as methane g...

Optical and geometrical characteristics of cirrus clouds over a mid-latitude lidar station

Pii: S0273-1177(01)00057-6

Although lightning has not been observed in Titan's atmosphere, the presence of methane rain in the troposphere suggests the possibility of electrical activity in the form of corona and/or lightning discharges. Here we examine the chemical effects of these electrical processes on a Titan simulated atmosphere composed of CH4 in N2 at various mixing ratios. Corona discharges were simulated in two...