Modeling the redistribution of dust across the Martian surface from Mars Years 24 to 36 [Data 2]

Abstract

This dataset contains four sets of model output files (NetCDF format) from dust cycle simulations using the Mars Planetary Climate Model (Mars PCM; Forget et al., 1999; Madeleine et al., 2011). The output files contain 2-dimensional fields that can be used for analyzing the simulated surface dust redistribution on Mars. The first set contains 13 Mars Years of simulations (MYs 24-36) with the default Mars PCM6, meaning activated rocket dust storm (RDS) and mountain top flow (MTF) schemes (Wang et al., 2018; Bierjon et al., 2022). The second set contains the same time frame of simulations but with deactivated RDS/MTF schemes. These two first sets use the original maps of the column dust optical depth (CDOD) from Montabone et al. (2015, 2020) as dust scenarios to drive the dust injection in the model. The third set contains the model output of 3 simulations with shifted timings of the Mars Year 25 global dust event. The fourth set contains the model output for MYs 28-33 with dust scenarios containing merged data from the original CDOD maps and the Mars Dust Storm Sequence Dataset (MDSSD; Saidel et al., 2022). The dust scenarios used for the third and fourth set were published at Ramette et al. (2025). This dataset further contains Python functions for reading the NetCDF files in this dataset and calculating net surface dust fluxes (not plug-and-play).