Decrease in hysteresis of planetary climate for planets with long solar days
Published in Astrophysical Journal, 2018
Recommended citation: Abbot, Dorian S., Jonah Bloch-Johnson, Jade Checlair, Navah X. Farahat, R. J. Graham, David Plotkin, Predrag Popovic, and and Francisco Spaulding-Astudillo. "Decrease in Hysteresis of Planetary Climate for Planets with Long Solar Days" The Astrophysical Journal 854, no. 1 (2018): 3. DOI:10.3847/1538-4357/aaa70f. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aaa70f
In this paper, we use the general circulation model PlaSim to show that slowly rotating planets have a much narrower range of instellations over which they display the bistability between temperate and snowball states that characterizes the climates of more rapidly rotating planets like the Earth. This suggests that slowly rotating planets are less vulnerable to catastrophic runaway glaciation than rapid rotators, which may increase their climatic stability in the outer reaches of the habitable zone.