The absence of motor vehicle traffic and suspended manufacturing during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in China enabled assessment of the efficiency of air pollution mitigation. Up ...to 90% reduction of certain emissions during the city-lockdown period can be identified from satellite and ground-based observations. Unexpectedly, extreme particulate matter levels simultaneously occurred in northern China. Our synergistic observation analyses and model simulations show that anomalously high humidity promoted aerosol heterogeneous chemistry, along with stagnant airflow and uninterrupted emissions from power plants and petrochemical facilities, contributing to severe haze formation. Also, because of nonlinear production chemistry and titration of ozone in winter, reduced nitrogen oxides resulted in ozone enhancement in urban areas, further increasing the atmospheric oxidizing capacity and facilitating secondary aerosol formation.
ABSTRACT Warm Neptune- and sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets in orbits smaller than Mercury's are thought to have experienced extensive atmospheric evolution. Here we propose that a potential outcome of ...this atmospheric evolution is the formation of helium-dominated atmospheres. The hydrodynamic escape rates of Neptune- and sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets are comparable to the diffusion-limited escape rate of hydrogen, and therefore the escape is heavily affected by diffusive separation between hydrogen and helium. A helium atmosphere can thus be formed-from a primordial hydrogen-helium atmosphere-via atmospheric hydrodynamic escape from the planet. The helium atmosphere has very different abundances of major carbon and oxygen species from those of a hydrogen atmosphere, leading to distinctive transmission and thermal emission spectral features. In particular, the hypothesis of a helium-dominated atmosphere can explain the thermal emission spectrum of GJ 436b, a warm Neptune-sized exoplanet, while also being consistent with the transmission spectrum. This model atmosphere contains trace amounts of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, with the predominance of CO over CH4 as the main form of carbon. With our atmospheric evolution model, we find that if the mass of the initial atmosphere envelope is 10−3 planetary mass, hydrodynamic escape can reduce the hydrogen abundance in the atmosphere by several orders of magnitude in ∼10 billion years. Observations of exoplanet transits may thus detect signatures of helium atmospheres and probe the evolutionary history of small exoplanets.
Exoplanet atmosphere spectroscopy enables us to improve our understanding of exoplanets just as remote sensing in our own solar system has increased our understanding of the solar system bodies. The ...challenge is to quantitatively determine the range of temperatures and molecular abundances allowed by the data, which is often difficult given the low information content of most exoplanet spectra that commonly leads to degeneracies in the interpretation. A variety of spectral retrieval approaches have been applied to exoplanet spectra, but no previous investigations have sought to compare these approaches. We compare three different retrieval methods: optimal estimation, differential evolution Markov chain Monte Carlo, and bootstrap Monte Carlo on a synthetic water-dominated hot Jupiter. We discuss expectations of uncertainties in abundances and temperatures given current and potential future observations. In general, we find that the three approaches agree for high spectral resolution, high signal-to-noise data expected to come from potential future spaceborne missions, but disagree for low-resolution, low signal-to-noise spectra representative of current observations. We also compare the results from a parameterized temperature profile versus a full classical Level-by-Level approach and discriminate in which situations each of these approaches is applicable. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of our models for the inferred C-to-O ratios of exoplanetary atmospheres. Specifically, we show that in the observational limit of a few photometric points, the retrieved C/O is biased toward values near solar and near one simply due to the assumption of uninformative priors.
Secondary eclipse spectroscopy provides invaluable insights into the temperatures and compositions of exoplanetary atmospheres. We carry out a systematic temperature and abundance retrieval analysis ...of nine exoplanets (HD 189733b, HD 209458b, HD 149026b, GJ436b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b, WASP-43b, TrES-2b, and TrES-3b) observed in secondary eclipse using a combination of space- and ground-based facilities. Our goal with this analysis is to provide a consistent set of temperatures and compositions from which self-consistent models can be compared and to probe the underlying processes that shape these atmospheres. This paper is the second in a three part series of papers exploring the retrievability of temperatures and abundances from secondary eclipse spectra and the implications of these results for the chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres. In this investigation we present a catalogue of temperatures and abundances for H sub(2)O, CH sub(4), CO, and CO sub(2). We find that our temperatures and abundances are generally consistent with those of previous studies, although we do not find any statistically convincing evidence for super-solar C to O ratios (e.g., solar C/O falls in the 1sigma confidence intervals in eight of the nine planets in our sample). Furthermore, within our sample we find little evidence for thermal inversions over a wide range of effective temperatures (with the exception of HD 209458b), consistent with previous investigations. The lack of evidence for inversions for most planets in our sample over such a wide range of effective temperatures provides additional support for the hypothesis that TiO is unlikely to be the absorber responsible for the formation of these inversions.
The climate of Mars likely evolved from a warmer, wetter early state to the cold, arid current state. However, no solutions for this evolution have previously been found to satisfy the observed ...geological features and isotopic measurements of the atmosphere. Here we show that a family of solutions exist, invoking no missing reservoirs or loss processes. Escape of carbon via CO photodissociation and sputtering enriches heavy carbon ((13)C) in the Martian atmosphere, partially compensated by moderate carbonate precipitation. The current atmospheric (13)C/(12)C and rock and soil carbonate measurements indicate an early atmosphere with a surface pressure <1 bar. Only scenarios with large amounts of carbonate formation in open lakes permit higher values up to 1.8 bar. The evolutionary scenarios are fully testable with data from the MAVEN mission and further studies of the isotopic composition of carbonate in the Martian rock record through time.
We quantify the amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx) produced through lightning and photochemical processes in the Hadean atmosphere to be available in the Hadean ocean for the emergence of life. ...Atmospherically generated nitrate (NO
) and nitrite (NO
) are the most attractive high-potential electron acceptors for pulling and enabling crucial redox reactions of autotrophic metabolic pathways at submarine alkaline hydrothermal vents. The Hadean atmosphere, dominated by CO
and N
, will produce nitric oxide (NO) when shocked by lightning. Photochemical reactions involving NO and H
O vapor will then produce acids such as HNO, HNO
, HNO
, and HO
NO
that rain into the ocean. There, they dissociate into or react to form nitrate and nitrite. We present new calculations based on a novel combination of early-Earth global climate model and photochemical modeling, and we predict the flux of NOx to the Hadean ocean. In our 0.1-, 1-, and 10-bar pCO
models, we calculate the NOx delivery to be 2.4 × 10
, 6.5 × 10
, and 1.9 × 10
molecules cm
s
. After only tens of thousands to tens of millions of years, these NOx fluxes are expected to produce sufficient (micromolar) ocean concentrations of high-potential electron acceptors for the emergence of life. Key Words: Nitrogen oxides-Nitrate-Nitrite-Photochemistry-Lightning-Emergence of life. Astrobiology 17, 975-983.
The change of global-mean precipitation under global warming and interannual variability is predominantly controlled by the change of atmospheric longwave radiative cooling. Here we show that ...tightening of the ascending branch of the Hadley Circulation coupled with a decrease in tropical high cloud fraction is key in modulating precipitation response to surface warming. The magnitude of high cloud shrinkage is a primary contributor to the intermodel spread in the changes of tropical-mean outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and global-mean precipitation per unit surface warming (dP/dT
) for both interannual variability and global warming. Compared to observations, most Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5 models underestimate the rates of interannual tropical-mean dOLR/dT
and global-mean dP/dT
, consistent with the muted tropical high cloud shrinkage. We find that the five models that agree with the observation-based interannual dP/dT
all predict dP/dT
under global warming higher than the ensemble mean dP/dT
from the ∼20 models analysed in this study.
Nonlinearity in photochemical systems is known to allow self-sustained oscillations, but they have received little attention in studies of planetary atmospheres. Here, we present a unique, ...self-oscillatory solution for ozone chemistry of an exoplanet from a numerical simulation using a fully coupled, three-dimensional (3D) atmospheric chemistry-radiation-dynamics model. Forced with nonvarying stellar insolation and emission flux of nitric oxide (NO), atmospheric ozone abundance oscillates by a factor of thirty over a multidecadal timescale. As such self-oscillations can only occur with biological nitrogen fixation contributing to NO emission, we propose that they are a unique class of biosignature. The resulting temporal variability in the atmospheric spectrum is potentially observable. Our results underscore the importance of revisiting the spectra of exoplanets over multidecadal timescales to characterizing the atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets and searching for exoplanet biosignatures. There are also profound implications for comparative planetology and the evolution of the atmospheres of terrestrial planets in the solar system and beyond. Fully coupled, 3D atmospheric chemistry-radiation-dynamics models can reveal new phenomena that may not exist in one-dimensional models, and hence, they are powerful tools for future planetary atmospheric research.
It has been shown that spectroscopy of transiting extrasolar planets can potentially provide a wealth of information about their atmospheres. Herein, we set up the inverse problem in spectroscopic ...retrieval. We use nonlinear optimal estimation to retrieve the atmospheric state (pioneered for Earth sounding by Rodgers). The formulation quantifies the degrees of freedom and information content of the spectrum with respect to geophysical parameters; herein, we focus specifically on temperature and composition. First, we apply the technique to synthetic near-infrared spectra and explore the influence of spectral signal-to-noise ratio and resolution (the two important parameters when designing a future instrument) on the information content of the data. As expected, we find that the number of retrievable parameters increases with increasing signal-to-noise ratio and resolution, although the gains quickly level off for large values. Second, we apply the methods to the previously studied dayside near-infrared emission spectrum of HD 189733b and compare the results of our retrieval with those obtained by others.
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