30 October 2015: Nathan Mayne - (Exo)Planetary Climatology

Detections of exoplanets, and the subsequent beginnings of characterisation of their atmospheres has required the development, and adaptation of theoretical tools to interpret the observations. I will discuss the efforts underway at the University of Exeter, in collaboration with the UK Met Office, to create a theoretical framework which can be applied to any planetary atmosphere across a huge range of parameters. Linking the efforts of modeling exoplanets, to those of modeling our own planet's atmosphere, will allow us to harness the experience of the latter, and diversity of the former. I will explain the basic aspects of modeling atmospheres, and the practicalities of how this is done. Then I will focus on recent results for  gaseous exoplanets (hot Jupiters and brown dwarfs) obtained using our 1D and 3D tools, and discuss future projects.