EOS-ESTM: A flexible climate model for habitable exoplanets

Rocky planets with temperate conditions provide the best chance for discovering habitable worlds and life outside the Solar System. In the last decades, new instrumental facilities and large observational campaigns have been driven by the quest for habitable worlds. Climate models aimed at studying the habitability of rocky planets are essential tools to pay off these technological and observational endeavours. In this context, we present EOS-ESTM, a fast and flexible model aimed at exploring the impact on habitability of multiple climate factors, including those unconstrained by observations. EOS-ESTM is built on ESTM, a seasonal-latitudinal energy balance model featuring an advanced treatment of the meridional and vertical transport. The novel features of EOS-ESTM include: (1) parameterizations for simulating the climate impact of oceans, land, ice, and clouds as a function of temperature and stellar zenith distance; (2) a procedure (EOS) for calculating the radiative transfer in atmospheres with terrestrial and non-terrestrial compositions illuminated by solar- and non-solar-type stars. By feeding EOS-ESTM with Earth’s stellar, orbital and planetary parameters we derive a reference model that satisfies a large number of observational constraints of the Earth’s climate system. Validation tests of non-terrestrial conditions yield predictions that are in line with comparable results obtained with a hierarchy of climate models. The application of EOS-ESTM to planetary atmospheres in maximum greenhouse conditions demonstrates the possibility of tracking the snowball transition at the outer edge of the HZ for a variety of planetary parameters, paving the road for multi-parametric studies of the HZ