Shows the complex cloud structures observed on Jupiter by the Galileo Spacecraft. Brown Dwarfs, however, which are more massive and generally hotter than Jupiter, can have condensation of silicates and iron vapor near their photospheres rather than water and ammonia, as we see on Jupiter.
From June 2000 -
December 2002, I
worked
under the advisement of Professor
Jonathan I. Lunine in the Department
of Planetary Sciences / Lunar and Planetary Laboratory here at the University of Arizona. The
work was done in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral program in Planetary
Sciences.
In the spirit of the UA Theoretical Astrophysics Program, we colloborated with David Sudarsky and Adam Burrows in the Department of Astronomy / Steward Observatory and Drew Milsom in the Department of Physics. Our work involved the development one-dimensional models of clouds in brown dwarf and giant planet atmospheres to assist in radiative transfer calculations of these dusty atmospheres. We demonstrated the feasibility of incorporating a simple cloud model into planetary radiative transport models directly. Our work has since been published in the Astrophysical Journal:
C.S. Cooper, D. Sudarsky, J.A. Milsom, J.I. Lunine, and A. Burrows, "Modeling the Formation of Clouds in Brown Dwarf Atmospheres," The Astrophysical Journal, v586 n2, April 1, 2003. You can download the Cooper et al. (2003) paper in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format here. Posted here with permission from the Astrophysical Journal.
We are releasing the source code used in these calculations to the astronomy community under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The source code file is a gzipped tarball.1
The cloud module itself is written in Standard C, but the module is callable from Fortran. The example program sample_f77.f demonstrates how to do this using GNU C (gcc) and GNU Fortran 77 (g77) in Linux. Please contact me if you have trouble compiling the source code on your platform.
Additionally, you may browse the source code documentation files. These are parsed from the model source code directly using the fabulous Doxygen source code documentation tool.
Click here to download the user guide for the model, also in PDF format. Created using the free Latex document preparation system.
In the spirit of the UA Theoretical Astrophysics Program, we colloborated with David Sudarsky and Adam Burrows in the Department of Astronomy / Steward Observatory and Drew Milsom in the Department of Physics. Our work involved the development one-dimensional models of clouds in brown dwarf and giant planet atmospheres to assist in radiative transfer calculations of these dusty atmospheres. We demonstrated the feasibility of incorporating a simple cloud model into planetary radiative transport models directly. Our work has since been published in the Astrophysical Journal:
C.S. Cooper, D. Sudarsky, J.A. Milsom, J.I. Lunine, and A. Burrows, "Modeling the Formation of Clouds in Brown Dwarf Atmospheres," The Astrophysical Journal, v586 n2, April 1, 2003. You can download the Cooper et al. (2003) paper in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format here. Posted here with permission from the Astrophysical Journal.
Module Source Code
We are releasing the source code used in these calculations to the astronomy community under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The source code file is a gzipped tarball.1
The cloud module itself is written in Standard C, but the module is callable from Fortran. The example program sample_f77.f demonstrates how to do this using GNU C (gcc) and GNU Fortran 77 (g77) in Linux. Please contact me if you have trouble compiling the source code on your platform.
Additionally, you may browse the source code documentation files. These are parsed from the model source code directly using the fabulous Doxygen source code documentation tool.
Click here to download the user guide for the model, also in PDF format. Created using the free Latex document preparation system.
1Use
'gunzip'
followed by 'tar -xvf' on the file after it is
downloaded in order to access the source tree (or just tar -zxvf if you
have GNU tar
installed).