Papers › A New Sedimentation Model for Greater Cloud Diversity in Giant Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs
A New Sedimentation Model for Greater Cloud Diversity in Giant Exoplanets and Brown Dwarfs
Caoimhe M. Rooney, Natasha E. Batalha, Peter Gao, Mark S. Marley
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The observed atmospheric spectrum of exoplanets and brown dwarfs depends critically on the presence and distribution of atmospheric condensates. The Ackerman & Marley (2001) methodology for predicting the vertical distribution of condensate particles is widely used to study cloudy atmospheres and has recently been implemented in an open-source python package virga. The model relies upon input parameter f_(sed), the sedimentation efficiency, which until now has been held constant. The relative simplicity of this model renders it useful for retrieval studies due to its rapidly attainable solutions. However, comparisons with more complex microphysical models such as CARMA have highlighted inconsistencies between the two approaches, namely that the cloud parameters needed for radiative transfer produced by virga are dissimilar to those produced by CARMA. To address these discrepancies, we have extended the original Ackerman and Marley methodology in virga to allow for non-constant f_(sed) values, in particular those that vary with altitude. We discuss one such parameterization and compare the cloud mass mixing ratio produced by virga with constant and variable f_(sed) profiles to that produced by CARMA. We find that the variable f_(sed) formulation better captures the profile produced by CARMA with heterogeneous nucleation, yet performs comparatively to constant f_(sed) for homogeneous nucleation. In general, virga has the capacity to handle any f_(sed) with an explicit anti-derivative, permitting a plethora of alternative cloud profiles that are otherwise unattainable by constant f_(sed) values. The ensuing flexibility has the potential to better agree with increasingly complex models and observed data.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections