Planetary Waves Drive Horizontal Variations in Trace Species in the Venus Deep Atmosphere

The deep atmosphere of Venus remains mysterious because of the planet’s high, optically thick cloud decks. While phenomena such as the observed decadal fluctuations in sulfur dioxide abundance above the clouds could shed light on conditions below, poor understanding of vertical and horizontal transport limits such an approach. Nightside spectral windows permit observation of trace gas species in the lower atmosphere, but incomplete understanding of the circulation makes the distribution of these species challenging to interpret. We performed two simulations with the Venus Planetary Climate Model including an age of air calculation to investigate tracer transport (a) between the surface and the stagnant lower haze layer and (b) between the cloud deck and the observable upper atmosphere. We find a timescale on the order of many decades for surface-to-lower haze layer transport and ∼1.4 yr from the lowest cloud deck to 101 km. The extreme slowness of transport from the surface to the clouds makes it unlikely that compositional variability at the surface could affect the upper atmosphere sulfur dioxide abundance on observed timescales. Planetary-scale Rossby waves with a zonal wavenumber of 1 in both hemispheres are found to circumnavigate the planet in the deep atmosphere in 36 Earth days. These waves are associated with gyres that collect tracers and areas of upwelling that transport them to higher altitudes, leading to significantly younger air at polar latitudes in the altitude range of 25–45 km. The existence of chemically enhanced traveling Rossby gyres could explain the observed deep atmosphere carbon monoxide variability.