Dust cycles and storms in a Mars GCM

A number of different dust lifting parameterizations have been used to model the injection of dust from the Martian surface into the atmosphere, and the form of the resulting dust cycles and dust storms produced are found to be highly dependent on the precise form of the parameterization used, provided that it includes some threshold dependence, and particularly where radiatively active dust transport is employed. This talk will review the most interesting results from previous work. We have recently altered a key factor which particularly affects the dust lifting due to near-surface wind stress, however, so we will also present results using the new dust lifting formulation, and make some comparisons. In the boundary layer, the drag velocity u may be given by (see e.g. [1])