Martian cloud climatology and life cycle extracted from Mars Express OMEGA spectral images

摘要

A Martian water-ice cloud climatology has been extracted from OMEGA data covering 7 Martian years (MY 26-32) on the dayside. We derived two products, the Reversed Ice Cloud Index (ICIR) and the Percentage of Cloudy Pixels (PCP), indicating the mean cloud thickness and nebulosity over a regular grid (1 degrees longitude x 1 degrees latitude x 1 degrees Ls x 1 h Local Time). The ICIR has been shown to be a proxy of the water-ice column derived from the Mars Climate Database.