LES of the Martian convective boundary layer: Towards developing a new planetary boundary layer scheme

The grid resolutions typically employed by atmospheric global circulation and mesoscale models are not sufficiently high to explicitly resolve the turbulence processes within the planetary boundary layer (PBL). Therefore, turbulence fluxes must be fully parameterized in global circulation and mesoscale models using PBL schemes, unlike microscale models, which use the large-eddy simulation (LES) technique to resolve turbulence processes. PBL schemes perform turbulence parameterization using empirical relationships for the mixing length scale. In this study, we provide an LES database for different convective stability conditions to investigate turbulence statistics and derive the first mixing length scale formulation, specifically developed for the Martian convective PBL. The proposed PBL scheme is implemented into MarsWRF multiscale model. its performance is compared to an algebraic PBL scheme currently in use in MarsWRF model. Despite both PBL schemes performed similarly to predict the near-surface meteorological conditions at Gale crater, the presently proposed PBL scheme provided better results in terms of predicting convective boundary layer height with respect to the observational estimations acquired by the radio occultations of Mars Express.