A cloudy view of exoplanets

A cloudy Vlasov solution

We propose to integrate the Vlasov-Poisson equations giving the evolution of a dynam-ical system in phase-space using a continuous set of local basis functions. In practice, the method decomposes the density in phase-space into small smooth units having compact support. We call these small units " clouds " and choose them to be Gaussians of elliptical support. Fortunately, the evolution of thes...

Waves in a Cloudy Vortex

This paper derives a system of equations that approximately govern small-amplitude perturbations in a nonprecipitating cloudy vortex. The cloud coverage can be partial or complete. The model is used to examine moist vortex Rossby wave dynamics analytically and computationally. One example shows that clouds can slow the growth of phase-locked counter-propagating vortex Rossby waves in the eyewal...

Lasing on a cloudy afternoon.

Cloudy Skies

Standard Gaussian-type statistics are not really adequate to describe atmospheric variability; this traditional approach implicitly dismisses fluctuations as "noise" of use only in computing a standard deviation which, together with the mean, presumably varies so little in space and time that one can meaningfully speak of "climatological" values. In geophysics, unfortunately, this approach ofte...

Statistical properties of exoplanets

In this article we present a detailed spectroscopic analysis of more than 50 extra-solar planet host stars. Stellar atmospheric parameters and metallicities are derived using high resolution and high S/N spectra. The spectroscopy results, added to the previous studies, imply that we have access to a large and uniform sample of metallicities for about 80 planet hosts stars. We make use of this s...