  More than two dozen short-period Jupiter-mass gas giant planets have been
discovered around nearby solar-type stars in recent years, several of which
undergo transits, making them ideal for the detection and characterization of
their atmospheres. Here we adopt a three-dimensional radiative hydrodynamical
numerical scheme to simulate atmospheric circulation on close-in gas giant
planets. In contrast to the conventional GCM and shallow water algorithms, this
method does not assume quasi hydrostatic equilibrium and it approximates
radiation transfer from optically thin to thick regions with flux-limited
diffusion. In the first paper of this series, we consider
synchronously-spinning gas giants. We show that a full three-dimensional
treatment, coupled with rotationally modified flows and an accurate treatment
of radiation, yields a clear temperature transition at the terminator. Based on
a series of numerical simulations with varying opacities, we show that the
night-side temperature is a strong indicator of the opacity of the planetary
atmosphere. Planetary atmospheres that maintain large, interstellar opacities
will exhibit large day-night temperature differences, while planets with
reduced atmospheric opacities due to extensive grain growth and sedimentation
will exhibit much more uniform temperatures throughout their photosphere's. In
addition to numerical results, we present a four-zone analytic approximation to
explain this dependence.
