Gen-EBM: an energy balance model for terrestrial planets. Climate multistability from snowball to post-runaway greenhouse climates

Climate multistability and tipping points are fundamental properties of planetary climates that depend sensitively on climate feedbacks. We introduce the Geneva Energy Balance Model (Gen-EBM), a new 1-D latitudinal EBM for rapid exploration of terrestrial planet climates, and use it to investigate how planetary rotation, eccentricity, and thermal inertia shape climate attractors and multistability. Gen-EBM is implemented in Rust and builds on previous exoplanet EBMs by incorporating a temperature-dependent outgoing longwave radiation prescription spanning Earth-like, runaway-onset, and post-runaway greenhouse regimes. We construct bifurcation diagrams from ensembles of simulations and explore the effects of rotation rate, orbital eccentricity under the mean-flux approximation, and surface thermal inertia. Including post-runaway greenhouse states substantially enlarges the parameter space over which multiple climate states coexist. Within our model framework, slow rotators approach the spatially homogeneous limit and maintain broader temperate stability ranges, whereas fast rotators develop strong equator-to-pole temperature gradients that narrow the temperate branch. Under the mean-flux approximation, increasing eccentricity enhances climate variability and can alter the attractor structure itself. The critical eccentricity at which temperate climates disappear depends strongly on thermal inertia, with ocean-rich planets remaining stable to larger eccentricities than land-dominated planets. Gen-EBM therefore broadens rapid parameter-space exploration to climates spanning temperate, runaway-onset, and post-runaway regimes. Its computational efficiency and flexibility make it a valuable bridge between simple climate models and 3-D general circulation models.

Source: arXiv:2610.12267v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12267v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.12267v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12267v1