event
Wednesday 22 Jul 2020: [Seminar] THOR: a general circulation model for exoplanets
Russell Deitrick - University of Bern
Remote seminar 14:00-15:00
THOR is the first fully global, non-hydrostatic GCM developed specifically for the study of exoplanets, and thus is free of Earth/Solar system tunings. In THOR, we utilize an icosahedral grid to solve common issues that appear at the poles in traditional grids. This version is the culmination of eight years of work by the Heng group in Bern and is an open-source community resource (available here: github.com/exoclime/THOR). We have professionalized the code in a number of ways and consolidated several new physics modules. I will discuss benchmark tests and diagnostics we have performed with THOR and present results for a range of types of planets, from terrestrial to hot Jupiters. I present comparisons of the model output using different numerical tunings and approximations and discuss the robustness of observable features of hot Jupiters. I further discuss recent updates to the model and our future directions.
