The Mars general circulation model (MGCM) is the result of a research project by NASA to understand the nature of the general circulation of the atmosphere of Mars, how that circulation is driven and how it affects the climate of Mars

Climate of Mars

The climate of Mars has been an issue of scientific curiosity for centuries, not least because Mars is the only terrestrial planet whose surface can be directly observed in detail from the Earth....

 in the long term.

History

Mars climate simulation models date as far back as the Viking missions to Mars. Most Mars climate simulation models were one off models written by individual researchers that never were never reused or open sourced. By the 1990s the need for a unified model codebase came into being, due to the general impact of the internet on climate modelling and research. This current Mars climate simulation model has its origins with the internet era.

How it works

This Mars climate model is a complex 3 dimensional (height, latitude, longitude) model, which represents the processes of atmospheric heating by gases and ground-air heat transfer, as well as large-scale atmospheric motions.

The current model has not been modified for use with distributed computing systems like BOINC.

Other planets

There are global climate simulation models that have been written for Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Venus.http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~tapio/animations.html