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Abstract

For obvious reasons the atmosphere of Venus has received much less attention in the natural sciences than the atmosphere of Earth. The same is true for numerical modeling efforts concerning the two atmospheres. The circulation of Venus’ atmosphere can be described by the same set of basic equations valid for the other planetary atmospheres: the Navier-Stokes equations describing the temporal evolution of momentum plus equations of continuity and the conservation of thermodynamic energy (see Chap. 5). These equations are discretized in the so-called dynamical cores of numerical models, and it is not surprising that Venus models, in general, use dynamical cores originally built for Earth modeling (see Chap. 6). Parameterizations needed in complex planetary models to describe subgrid-scale processes are more difficult to exchange because parameters may differ considerably among planets. Nevertheless, many parameterizations used in Venus models are based on developments made for other planets.