MeteoMars, a tool to explore meteorological events on Mars.
Ordóñez-Etxeberria, I., Planetario de Pamplona, 31008 Pamplona (Spain) (i.ordonez@pamplonetario.org),
Sánchez-Lavega, A., Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao UPV/EHU (Spain), Ordorika, T., Red Astronavarra
Sarea, Pamplona (Spain), Hueso, R., Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU, Bilbao (Spain).

Introduction:
MeteoMars is an outreach, education and research project promoted by the Pamplona Planetarium and the Planetary Sciences Group of the University of the Basque Country, which through a web
interface it allows to explore combinations of images
taken by the MARCI camera (Malin et al., 2001;
Bell et al., 2009) on board the Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter mission (MRO). The website is accessible at
http://meteomars.pamplonetario.org/ and uses only
public data retrieved from the Planetary Data System’s Cartography and Imaging Science Node at
https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/mro.html.
At present, all the images obtained during 2020
and the end of 2019 have been processed. Those
available for 2021 will be included shortly, and
gradually those prior to 2019, that will allow a meteorological perspective during a whole Martian year.
MARCI data:
The MRO mission has a polar orbit that allows
the MARCI camera to take pushbroom scan images
that cover all latitudes in a range of 30º longitude
degrees per orbit. Scans of different longitudes are
obtained with a time difference of about 2 h. With
the combination of 13 of these consecutive images,
obtained in 13 consecutive orbits, it is possible to
obtain a complete daily map of the planet (Wang and
Richardson, 2015). The observed surface at each of
the swaths is centered around 15:00±2 hr of local
solar time, which therefore allows a global vision of
the meteorological situation of Mars during afternoon hours.
MARCI obtains images at different wavelengths.
Five of the filters are in the visible to short-wave
near-infrared wavelength range (437, 546, 604, 653,
and 718 nm) and two are in the ultraviolet range
(258 and 320 nm) (Bell et al., 2009). In MeteoMars,
bands 3 (604 nm), 2 (546 nm), and 1 (437 nm) have
been combined to obtain an RGB image that is a
close approximation to the colors of the surface and
atmosphere.
MARCI obtain images at a resolution of around
1 km/px at nadir (Bell et al., 2009), although in MeteoMars the images are displayed at a resolution of

10 km/px to improve accessibility and the speed of
loading the images.
For the processing of the images, we have used
ISIS tools, separating the bands, mapping them, and
combining in an equirectangular map. ISIS is available from the United States Geologic Survey
(https://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov).
In addition,
tools from the GDAL library (GDAL/OGR contributors, 2022) have also been used to obtain the final
images for the web interface.
Web Interface:
The web interface is an adaptation of Map to
Globe web interface (https://www.maptoglobe.com),
removing the less interesting options for this project
and adding the ability to switch between images using only the keyboard cursor (Figure 1).
In addition, the swaths that set up each of the
global images have been included separately, to facilitate the interpretation and observation of overlapping regions. This options is useful when studying
events at high latitudes, in which the overlapping
surface between bands is greater than in the case of
more equatorial latitudes, and some of the features
could be masked because of the overlapping areas.

Figure 1. Main web interface of MeteoMars.

To improve the interpretation and location of
these events, a digital elevation model obtained from
MOLA observations has been included, which provides a relief shading to the sphere shown in MeteoMars (Figure 2.). This relief shading can be modulated and even removed if necessary.

one day to the next. It is a tool to study the dynamics
of dust storm, clouds with gravitational wave structures (Figure 4), the formation and evolution of orographic clouds over the surface (Figure 5), and the
evolution of the polar caps (Figure 6), among other
meteorological events of interest observed at these
spatial resolutions.

Figure 2. Scalable relief shading in the spherical projection.

The spherical projection in the interface allows
the exploration of any area of the planet, maintaining
the position and scale between each image, and
therefore allowing the observation of the meteorological variation between different sols without losing the perspective and location of the study area. In
addition, the possibility of modifying the cartographic projection has been incorporated to offer a better
visualization depending on the region of analysis
(Figure 3.).

Figure 4. A regional dust storm and a group of gravitational
waves close to the polar cap.

Figure 5. Orographic clouds over Olympus Mons.

Figure 3. Different cartographic projections available in
MeteoMars.

Meteorological events exploration:
MARCI images (from PDS archive) have been
successfully used in our team, for the exploration of
specific meteorological events in combination with
images from other spacecraft cameras (for example
in Sánchez-Lavega et al., 2018a; Sánchez-Lavega et
al., 2018b, Wolff et al., 2019; Ordonez-Etxeberria et
al., 2020; Hernández-Bernal et al., 2021), due to its
spatial and temporal resolution.
With the MeteoMars tool it is possible to observe the
meteorological changes that happen on Mars from

Figure 6. Evolution of the north polar cap

Next steps:
More images will be added soon with the processing of the captures with MARCI prior to August
2019. Improvements in the images processing will
be added to mitigate the increased brightness on the
sides of each swath, thus, improving the capabilities
of the images to explore details of the equatorial
regions (Figure 7).

Sánchez-Lavega, A., Garro, A., del RíoGaztelurrutia, T., Hueso, R., Ordoñez-Etxeberria,
I., Chen Chen, H., et al. (2018a). A seasonally
recurrent annular cyclone in Mars northern latitudes and observations of a companion vortex.
Sánchez-Lavega, A., Chen-Chen, H., OrdoñezEtxeberria, I., Hueso, R., Del Río-Gaztelurrutia,
T., Garro, A., Cardesín-Moinelo, A., Titov, D.,
Wood, S., (2018b). Limb clouds and dust on
Mars from images obtained by the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) onboard Mars Express,
Icarus, Volume 299, Pages 194-205.
Wang, H., & Richardson, M. I. (2015). The origin,
evolution, and trajectory of large dust storms on
Mars during Mars years 24–30 (1999–2011). Icarus, 251, 112–127.

Figure 7. Capture of the equatorial zone where the
bright edges highlight on the sides of each swath.

References:
Bell, J. F., Wolff, M. J., Malin, M. C., Calvin, W.
M., Cantor, B. A., Caplinger, M. A., et al.
(2009). Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Color
Imager (MARCI): Instrument description, calibration, and performance. Journal of Geophysical
Research, 114(E8), 153–41.
GDAL/OGR contributors (2022). GDAL/OGR Geospatial Data Abstraction software Library. Open
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Geospatial
Foundation.
URL
https://gdal.org DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5884351
Hernández-Bernal, J., Sánchez-Lavega, A., del RíoGaztelurrutia, T., Ravanis, E., Cardesín-Moinelo,
A., Connour, K., et al. (2021). An extremely
elongated cloud over Arsia Mons volcano on
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A., & Vicente-Retorillo, Á. (2020). Characterization of a local dust storm on Mars with
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Wolff, M. J., Clancy, R. T., Kahre, M. A., Haberle,
R. M., Forget, F., Cantor, B. A., et al. (2019).
Mapping water ice clouds on Mars with
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