Preliminary results of a Mesoscale Model for MARS

The Earth atmospheric circulation has been studied for long timeusing both GCM (General Circulation Models) and Mesoscale Models or LAM (Limited Area Models). The latter have been widely applied to study local circulation at high resolution and for weather forecasting. In the last years, the Martian atmosphere arouse the interest of the scientific community, both for supporting the landing of Beagle 2 lander and for studying and assessing similarities/differences with the Earth atmosphere. To this aim, GCM have been successfully used. Recently, also Earth LAMs have been changed to simulate the Mars atmosphere, showing good results. The scarce availability of observations did not allowed for validating these models. In this work an attempt is made to validate the newly developed MARS-MM5 against GCM. The model simulation produced using a data base on the basis of output from multi-annual integration of two CGM (see Lewis S. R. et al., J. Geophys. Res., 104 (E10) (1999) 177) is used for statistically evaluates MARS-MM5. The preliminary results suggest that MARS-MM5 is able to correctly reproduce the Mars atmosphere, indeed either the horizontal and the vertical structure of temperature produced by MARS-MM5 is in good agreement with the ones produced by GCM. A few discrepancies are found in the PBL, probably produced by a different parameterization.