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Modeling of Ground Deformation and Shallow Surface Waves Generated by Martian Dust Devils and Perspectives for Near-Surface Structure Inversion

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Abstract

We investigated the possible seismic signatures of dust devils on Mars, both at long and short period, based on the analysis of Earth data and on forward modeling for Mars. Seismic and meteorological data collected in the Mojave Desert, California, recorded the signals generated by dust devils. In the 10–100 s band, the quasi-static surface deformation triggered by pressure fluctuations resulted in detectable ground-tilt effects: these are in good agreement with our modeling based on Sorrells’ theory. In addition, high-frequency records also exhibit a significant excitation in correspondence to dust devil episodes. Besides wind noise, this signal includes shallow surface waves due to the atmosphere-surface coupling and is used for a preliminary inversion of the near-surface S-wave profile down to 50 m depth. In the case of Mars, we modeled the long-period signals generated by the pressure field resulting from turbulence-resolving Large-Eddy Simulations. For typical dust-devil-like vortices with pressure drops of a couple Pascals, the corresponding horizontal acceleration is of a few nm/s2 for rocky subsurface models and reaches 10–20 nm/s2 for weak regolith models. In both cases, this signal can be detected by the Very-Broad Band seismometers of the InSight/SEIS experiment up to a distance of a few hundred meters from the vortex, the amplitude of the signal decreasing as the inverse of the distance. Atmospheric vortices are thus expected to be detected at the InSight landing site; the analysis of their seismic and atmospheric signals could lead to additional constraints on the near-surface structure, more precisely on the ground compliance and possibly on the seismic velocities.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by CNES and ANR SismoMars in the frame of the preparation of InSight/SEIS. B. Kenda acknowledges the support of ED560 STEP’UP and of the NASA InSight project for his PhD support. R. Lorenz acknowledges the support of NASA Grant NNX12AI04G. Research described in this paper was partially done by the InSight Project, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This is IPGP contribution 3844. This is InSight Contribution Number 26. We gratefully thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped us in improving the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Sorbonne Paris Cité, UMR 7154 CNRS, Univ. Paris Diderot, 75013, Paris, France

    Balthasar Kenda, Philippe Lognonné & Taichi Kawamura

  2. Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, UMR CNRS 8539, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace, UPMC Univ. Paris 6, Sorbonne Universités, 4 Place Jussieu, 75005, Paris, France

    Aymeric Spiga

  3. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, 91109, CA, USA

    Sharon Kedar, William Bruce Banerdt & Matthew Golombek

  4. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD, 20723, USA

    Ralph Lorenz

  5. Cornell Univeristy, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Don Banfield

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  1. Balthasar Kenda
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  2. Philippe Lognonné
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Kenda, B., Lognonné, P., Spiga, A. et al. Modeling of Ground Deformation and Shallow Surface Waves Generated by Martian Dust Devils and Perspectives for Near-Surface Structure Inversion. Space Sci Rev 211, 501–524 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-017-0378-0

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