KUIPER PRIZE LECTURE - PRESENT AND PAST CLIMATES OF THE TERRESTRIAL PLANETS

Spacecraft missions to Venus and Mars have led to a good definition of their present states but have also raised fundamental questions concerning their past climates. There has been, and continues to be, a very useful two-way exchange of information between studies of the Earth's climate and analogous investigations of the climates of Venus and Mars. A wide variety of tools have been developed to simulate the present and past climates of the terrestial planets. These range from one-dimensional radiative-convective models of their temperature structure that are useful for exploratory studies up to three-dimensional general circulation models of their winds and temperatures. In this paper, I illustrate the types of problems that these models have been applied to and the insights that they have provided. In the final section, I discuss some of the challenging problems for future studies. © 1991.