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The profusion of observational data made available by the Venus Express and previous space missions, increases our need to develop numerical tools to interpret the data and improve our understanding of the Venus meteorology. The main objective of this work is to develop an improved Venus general circulation model and to study the most likely mechanisms driving the atmosphere to the current observed circulation. Our new model is an extension of a simplified version and includes a new radiative transfer scheme and convection and an adapted boundary layer scheme and dynamical core that take into account the dependence of the heat capacity with temperature, at constant atmospheric pressure. The new radiative transfer formulation implemented is more suitable for Venus climate studies than previous works due to its easy adaptability to different atmospheric conditions. This flexibility of the model was very important in this work to explore the uncertainties on the lower atmospheric conditions such as the gas absorption and the possible presence of aerosols near the surface. The new general circulation model obtains, after long periods of integration, a super-rotation phenomenon in the cloud region quantitatively similar to the one observed. However, this phenomenon is sensitive to some radiative parameters such as the amount of the solar radiative energy absorbed by the surface and the amount of clouds. The super-rotation in the model is formed due to the combined influence of the zonal mean circulation, thermal tides and transient waves, and the main mechanisms involved are identified and studied. In this process the momentum transported by the semidiurnal tide excited in the upper clouds has a key contribution. These migrating waves transport prograde momentum mainly from the upper atmosphere to the cloud region. In this work we also explored the model parameters to gain a better understanding of the effect of topography, the diurnal cycle and convective momentum mixing. In general the results showed that: the topography seemed capable of sustaining stronger global super-rotation; without diurnal cycle the strong winds in the cloud region are not produced; the convective momentum mixing experiment did not lead to significant changes. A simple experiment done advecting the UV absorber in the atmosphere, qualitatively showed several atmospheric phenomena that are important for the distribution of clouds. Among them is the presence of a region of low permeability isolating the polar vortex. This last experiment also showed that when increasing the amount of UV absorption in the upper cloud region the winds get stronger. Following the interpretation of observational data using numerical models, we also used a simplified version of the general circulation model to assess the accuracy of zonal wind retrievals from measured temperatures using the cyclostrophic thermal wind equation in the Venus mesosphere. From this analysis we suggest a method which better estimates the lower boundary condition, and improves the consistency of the results at high latitudes when compared with cloud tracking measurements.

This thesis describes the derivation of Venusian global cloud properties from infrared remote sensing data obtained by the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on the European Space Agency Venus Express satellite. A computationally-efficient retrieval method is designed to exploit the dataset, which provides coverage of the entire nightside southern hemisphere of Venus. Spatially-resolved near-infrared spectra have been used to derive improved models of the vertical structure and global distribution of cloud properties in the southern hemisphere. Wavelengths within transparency windows in the 1.0 - 2.6 micron range covered by VIRTIS are sensitive on the nightside to absorption by the lower and middle sulphuric acid cloud layers, which are back-lit by thermally-emitted radiation from the hot lower atmosphere (Taylor et al. 1997). The cloud model used to interpret the spectra builds on work by Crisp (1986), Pollack et al. (1993) and Grinspoon et al. (1993). Retrieved parameters are the acid concentration in the cloud droplets, the average size of the particles in the lower cloud and the altitude of the cloud base in the model. Values are estimated initially using wavelength pairs selected for their unique sensitivity to each parameter, and then validated using model spectra generated using the NEMESIS radiative transfer and retrieval code (Irwin et al. 2008) as developed for Venus (Tsang et al. 2008a). The spatial variation of sulphuric acid concentration in the cloud particles is estimated ; the concentration is found to be higher in regions of optically thick cloud. The retrieved cloud base altitude varies with latitude, reaching a maximum height near -50 degreees before falling by several km towards the pole. An increase in average particle size near the pole (Wilson et al. 2008) and the finding of latitudinally-variable CO abundance at 35 - 40 km altitude (Tsang et al. 2008) are both confirmed. A decrease in tropospheric H₂O abundance at high latitudes is observed, and provides evidence for strong downwelling between +/-60 and +/-75 degrees latitude, which marks the poleward extent of the Hadley cell circulation. Long-term secular change is also observed over a period of two Earth years. The measurements presented here provide a reference dataset for microphysical and dynamical modelling of the cloud deck, and the role of the cloud as a dynamical and chemical tracer means that such observations are of considerable value for increased understanding of the Venusian atmosphere.