New Mars Forums

RobertDyck,

The images I first posted are screencaps of what this texture looks like in the space simulator Celestia. What you are seeing is the atmosphere and the effect of how it scatters light in a think Martian atmosphere. This is all being done in 3D in realtime. I only used Photoshop to crop and resize the screen captures. These atmospheric effects are coded into the program for acuracy, so what you are seeing is pretty darn close to what Mars atmosphere would look like f it were 2.5 times of what it is here on Earth, and made of the same gases. If I took a few screen captures of the Earth with the same settings what you would see is just about what it looks like from orbit in real life. Thats how acurate the program is, for the most part. Of course nothing is perfect.
As for water level, I have several earlier textures that have the water level  set at what is expected to be the average. In my own mind I chose to raise the water level for the main reason is the water makes a great heat sink. The more you have the more heat it can store for later needs and weather tuning. Earth is covered with over 75% water. To make Mars more like Earth I went for larger oceans as well. More water has many other benifits as well. But I am not a climatologist so I don't have all the details.

nickname,

I believe you are right about the water color, at least early on in the process. The water would probably be stained by all the iron oxied. But this is a full blown, fully terraformed Mars of lets say at least 50,000 years in the future. By that time bacteria, and other life forms, and other weathering processes would have washed most of the iron oxide away and tranformed the oceans into rich bio deverse habitats. All that iron oxide would have been consume very early on by transplanted plankton. So the seas would have gone from brown to green in probably a very short time. While vegitation on the land would be locking the rest away in the soil as it formed. So really having blue/green oceans some 50,000 years in the future is very much a posibility. It all depends on how far our technology goes an how fast we can get the process started.

And actualy a fully terraformed Mars would probably look very diferent from Earth simply by the way the land and seas are laid out. But life would make it look very similar in many ways. That is were this texture comes into play, the total end product.

This is what I do know at this point. Mars at its present time has two hadley cells, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere. These cells are what are responsible for moving moisture from the equatorial zones up to the polar zones and depositing it as ice. These hadley cells are driven by the coriolis effect as the planet’s rotation is dragging the atmosphere with as it rotates. On Earth, the thinker atmosphere breaks these cells into more cells that rotate in opposite directions. I believe we would see the same effect on Mars, equatorial air flowing westward and temperate zones flowing eastward, and the polar turning westward again. I know this is starting to get into some serious system dynamics here. But I am trying to take all this into consideration in the process.

About the images, they are not just pictures; they are actual screen captures of a fully 3D globe with this Mars texture working in real-time. Here is another example.

Thanks for your time.

Hello everyone,

I am new here and would like to get some input on a Terraformed Mars texture I creating for the space simulator Celestia. I have been a texture artist and creator in that community for over five years now. I started this texture over a year ago and it’s just now coming into the final stretches. A few questions had been raised as to what the weather patterns would be like on a terraformed Mars. So I decided to start and search for information to integrate into the texture. This is what the texture looks like at this point with and without clouds and rendered in 3D in Celestia.

This texture is of a Mars in a very advanced form of development, with a higher than average sea level, anad an atmosphere art about 2.5 bars at sea level.

The main thing I am trying to find out is if anyone has done in modeling on how the weather patterns on a Terraformed Mars would work. Mainly I am centered on hadley, ferris, and polar cells. I do know that they are created by the Coriolis Effect. I also know that the denser or thicker the atmosphere, the more of these cells are expected. But I also know that a planets size would also come into play. On Earth there are a total of six cells, three in the northern hemisphere and three in the southern. Theoretically if Earth atmosphere was two to three times thinker the number of cells would increase as well. So taking this into account, and scaling this to a planet the size of Mars, that would possibly bring the count of hadley, ferris, and polar cells back to the same count as the Earth. So again has anyone modeled this in anyway? Any information would help and any comments on the texture are welcome.

Thanks in advance and thank you Spatula for the welcome in another thread.