SPICAM Climatology of Aerosol Vertical Distribution through UV Occultations
Résumé
The four Martian years of data of SPICAM occultations show that the seasonal behavior of the hazetop follows closely the seasonal variations of the temperature. The highest hazetops are observed at the warm season around the southern summer solstice. Observations during the MY28 dust storm reveal very high hazetops and detached layers. The high northern latitudes in the autumn give the opposite example of very calm vertical distribution with a low hazetop. These data show that the assumption of a well-mixed dust in the lowest atmosphere is not the only option, but that the martian dust vertical distribution is very variable. We observed detached layers in more than half of the analyzed orbits (accounting for both solar and stellar occultations). The highest detached layers are observed during the global dust storm of MY28, but evident single and multiple layers are observed also during other seasons.
The solar occultation dataset can be accessed through the Supplementary Material of the article [1] and the Europlanet IDIS atmospheres node that can be found at http://www.bdap.ipsl.fr/idis/.
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