The Great Cold Spot in Jupiter's upper atmosphere

6 Dynamics of Jupiter ' s Atmosphere

Jupiter has half a dozen eastward jet streams in each hemisphere. On average, Earth has only one in each hemisphere. Jupiter has weather patterns ("storms'') that last for centuries. Earth has stationary weather patterns fixed to the topography, but the average lifetime of a traveling storm is rvl week. Jupiter has no topography, i.e. , no cont inents or oceans; its atmosphere merges smoothly w...

Young Et Al. 2002, Gravity Waves in Jupiter's Stratosphere 2. Observations

The temperatures in Jupiter's stratosphere, as measured by the Galileo Atmosphere Structure Instrument (ASI), show fluctuations that have been interpreted as gravity waves. We present a detailed description of these fluctuations, showing that they are not likely to be due to either measurement error or isotropic turbulence. These fluctuations share features with gravity waves observed in the te...

A comparison of the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn: deep atmospheric composition, cloud structure, vertical mixing, and origin.

We present our current understanding of the composition, vertical mixing, cloud structure and the origin of the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. Available observations point to a much more vigorous vertical mixing in Saturn's middle-upper atmosphere than in Jupiter's. The nearly cloud-free nature of the Galileo probe entry site, a 5-micron hotspot, is consistent with the depletion of condensa...

An Upper Bound to the Lightning Flash Rate in Jupiter's Atmosphere.

Jupiter's zonal winds: are they bands of homogenized potential vorticity organized as a monotonic staircase?

The east-west striped pattern of clouds in Jupiter's weather layer is accompanied by a zonal flow containing 12 eastward-going jet streams alternating in latitude with westward-going jet streams. Based on theory, simulation and observations of the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, it is conjectured that Jupiter's weather layer is made of bands of constant potential vorticity (PV), where the interf...