Curiosity provides details about weather patterns on Mars

BBC : The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) onboard Curiosity was damaged when the rover landed, but that hasn’t stopped it from gathering Martian weather data. Manuel de la Torre Juarez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says that, although Curiosity hasn’t taken any pictures of the dust devils characteristic of Martian wind storms, it appears that some may have passed over the rover. More significantly, Curiosity has detected a general east-to-west wind pattern inside Gale Crater. Because of the rover’s location near the mountain at the center of the crater, the scientists had expected a north-westerly wind. REMS has also recorded daily cycles of air pressure rising and falling as the Sun warms the air in the crater. The longer-term trend is a general increase in air pressure as the season changes from spring to summer. As the southern ice cap melts and evaporates, it adds more carbon dioxide to the air, thickening the atmosphere. One of the more interesting observations is that as the air pressure increases, the level of solar radiation at the surface decreases.