Mars Thermosphere Variability: MGITM Datasets for Disentangling the Influence of Irradiance, Dust and Dynamics

The NASA MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around Mars, has been taking systematic measurements of the densities and deriving temperatures in the upper atmosphere of Mars between about 140 to 240 km above the surface since late 2014. Wind measurement campaigns were also conducted once per month for 5-10 orbits since 2016. These densities, temperatures and winds change with time (e.g. solar cycle, season, local time) and location, and sometimes fluctuate quickly. Global dust storm events are also known to significantly impact these density, temperature and wind fields in the Mars thermosphere. For the current project, MAVEN EUVM solar occultation derived temperatures and CO2 densities are investigated to understand the dawn and dusk terminator seasonal, solar cycle and dust storm impacts and trends. Presently, more than 11 years of Extreme Ultraviolet Monitor (EUVM) measurements of these temperatures and densities have been obtained by the MAVEN team (e.g. Thiemann et al., 2018; 2026). These distributions are compared to simulations from a computer model of the Mars atmosphere called M-GITM (Mars Global Ionosphere-Thermosphere Model), developed at U. of Michigan. Since the global circulation plays a role in the structure, variability, and evolution of the atmosphere, understanding the processes that drive the winds in the upper atmosphere of Mars also provides the needed context for understanding temperature and CO2 densities distributions and how the atmosphere behaves as a whole system. Three dimensional M-GITM simulations for two Mars cardinal seasons (Ls ~ 270 and 90) were conducted for solar maximum (2015 and 2016) and solar minimum (2020 and 2019) conditions, respectively. For all these new simulations, a gravity wave (GW) momentum and energy deposition model was incorporated into M-GITM (Yigit et al. 2008; Roeten et al. 2022); subsequently these new simulations were conducted for two conditions (no gravity waves and full gravity wave forcing). The M-GITM datacubes generated from extracting these simulated temperatures and CO2 densities at 140, 160 and 180 km (along the EUVM sampling trajectories), are provided in this Deep Blue Data archive. An overview README file is provided that summarizes the inputs and outputs of the M-GITM code simulations for this study, including the contents of each datacube. Finally, a basic version of the M-GITM code can be found on Github at https:/github.com:dpawlows/MGITM.git