Brief communication: Lower-bound estimates for residence time of energy in the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Titan

Abstract

The residence time of energy in a planetary atmosphere, τ, which was recently introduced and computed for the Earth's atmosphere (Osácar et al., 2020), is here extended to the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Titan. τ is the timescale for the energy transport across the atmosphere. In the cases of Venus, Mars and Titan, these computations are lower bounds due to a lack of some energy data. If the analogy between τ and the solar Kelvin–Helmholtz scale is assumed, then τ would also be the time the atmosphere needs to return to equilibrium after a global thermal perturbation.