Chinese researchers have used a self-developed next generation Mars general circulation model, known as GoMars, to carry out a comprehensive simulation of the Martian dust cycle spanning 50 Martian years. The work aims to capture how airborne dust evolves over time and to provide a basis for more reliable Martian weather forecasts and climate projections.
The team at the Institute of Atmos Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 04, 2025
Chinese researchers have used a self-developed next generation Mars general circulation model, known as GoMars, to carry out a comprehensive simulation of the Martian dust cycle spanning 50 Martian years. The work aims to capture how airborne dust evolves over time and to provide a basis for more reliable Martian weather forecasts and climate projections.
The team at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported the results in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, focusing on the behavior of dust in the thin Martian atmosphere. They evaluated GoMars against existing observations to test how well the model reproduces key features of the planet's dust environment.
Mars is often described as Earth's closest planetary neighbor but presents hazards that include a tenuous atmosphere, strong radiation and large dust storms that can threaten spacecraft and human missions. The article notes that planet encircling dust storms, which can start with little warning, are a prominent form of Martian extreme weather and a major driver of year to year climate variability.
Despite Mars being one of the most intensively observed planets after Earth, current datasets leave gaps in time, space and resolution. Numerical atmospheric models such as GoMars can bridge these gaps by filling in unobserved regions and providing an end to end picture of the dust cycle and its role in the broader Martian climate system.
In their simulations, the researchers reproduced year to year variability in the Martian atmosphere, a long standing challenge for Mars modeling. They used GoMars to simulate the full life cycle of airborne dust, including lifting from the surface, transport and eventual removal from the atmosphere.
Because in situ measurements on Mars remain sparse, the group compared GoMars surface wind stress dust lifting flux with outputs from advanced models such as MarsWRF. The comparison showed close agreement in both the seasonal timing and geographic distribution of dust lifting, indicating that GoMars captures key physical processes in a manner consistent with other state of the art tools.
The team reported that GoMars can spontaneously generate simulated planet encircling dust storms and reproduce their onset times, centers of activity and transport pathways in a way that aligns with the limited but critical observations available for specific Martian years. This performance suggests the model can be used to study how these global events develop and evolve.
Looking ahead, the researchers plan to incorporate the Martian water cycle into GoMars to study interactions between dust and water vapor. Coupling dust and water processes is expected to improve understanding of how clouds, humidity and dust loading influence each other in different Martian seasons and regions.
Their stated goal is to turn GoMars into an operational forecasting system that can ingest real time data from China's planned Tianwen 3 Mars mission. In that configuration, the model would generate daily weather briefings for Mars to support future robotic and human activities on the planet.
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