Seven-Year Climatology of Dust Opacity on Mars

This paper describes the procedure we have used to produce multi-annual dust scenarios for Martian years 24 to 30 from a multi-instrument dataset of total dust opacity observations. This procedure includes gridding the observations on a pre-defined longitude-latitude grid with 1 sol resolution in time, and spatially interpolating the results to obtain complete daily maps of total dust opacity. We used weighted binning as gridding technique, and spatial kriging as method of interpolation. The new dust scenarios are available as NetCDF files, easy to interface to any model including global circulation and mesoscale models for the Martian atmosphere. 1