The surface diurnal temperature range measured at the Viking 1 lander site is between a nighttime low of 184 Kelvin and a daytime high of 242 Kelvin [14]. The climate modelling study presented here is informed by the Martian Year 29 (MY29) atmospheric temperature profile data first published in 2010 by McCleese et al. [6] and kindly supplied for use in this work [26,27].
2. MY29 Data Analysis and Presentation.
The Dynamic-Atmosphere Energy-Transport (DAET) climate model is predicated on a design protocol that ensures the computational existence of the dual planetary surface environments of a lit daytime hemisphere of net energy gain and a dark nighttime hemisphere of net energy loss [28].
In order to appropriately constrain the temperature data and to ensure that polar circle zones of continuous lit surface (summer) and continuous dark surface (winter) are appropriately binned, the MY29 source data was regrouped into two separate lit and dark data sets [26,27]. These two datasets incorporate the illumination effect of the seasonal axial tilt of Mars in the binning process (Table 4).