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Project Progress

This task focuses on the development of a generalized, yet comprehensive photochemical model for terrestrial planet atmospheres. This model is to interact with the climate model described in Task 2, to create a self-consistent climate-chemical model.

This year we completed the implementation and testing of the Caltech/JPL generalized planetary chemistry/transport model, KINETICS, using the Absoft FORTRAN compiler on a Linux computer, a similar computing environment as planned for Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL). Originally developed on a VAX/VMS computer with a VMS FORTRAN compiler, KINETICS was tested for portability on a Unix computer and with two different FORTRAN compilers on a Linux computer. When executed in all the different computing environments, both simple and relatively complex simulations gave the exact same results. The simple simulations were chosen for comparison with analytic solutions and reproduced these analytic solutions to better than 1%.

Current work continues on creating a master reaction file for terrestrial planets, and designing the software to access user-specified reaction sets to describe different classes of planetary atmospheres. We are also working with John Armstrong and Giovanna Tinetti to interface the chemistry model with the central VPL database and the climate model.