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The motions of Jupiter’s tropospheric jets and vortices are made visible by its outermost clouds, which are expected to be largely composed of ammonia ice. Several groups have demonstrated that much of this dynamics can be reproduced in the vorticity fields of high-resolution models that, surprisingly, do not contain any clouds. While this reductionist approach is valuable, it has natural limitations...
We report on a set of six new matches between fine-scale features in the vorticity field of a three-dimensional (3D), primitive-equation, finite-difference model of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot that includes no clouds or cloud physics, and quasi-permanent structures in reflected visible-band images of the clouds. These add to similar success by Cho et al. (Cho, J., de la Torre Juárez, M., Ingersoll, A...
Voyager flybys of Saturn in 1980–1981 revealed a circumpolar wave at ≈78° north planetographic latitude. The feature had a dominant wavenumber 6 mode, and has been termed the Hexagon from its geometric appearance in polar-projected mosaics. It was also noted for being stationary with respect to Saturn’s Kilometric Radiation (SKR) rotation rate. The Hexagon has persisted for over 30years since the...
The region in Jupiter’s atmosphere with the highest density of anticyclonic spot-like vortices is the region known as the South South Temperate Zone (SSTZ), which is located between the eastward jet at ≈−42.9° latitude and the westward jet at ≈−39.2° latitude. We present a characterization of the spots found in this region based on ground-based and Hubble Space Telescope observations from the years...
An active hydrological cycle has been added to the EPIC general circulation model (GCM) for planetary applications, with a special emphasis on Jupiter. Scientists have suspected for decades that clouds, and in particular latent heating, strongly influence Jupiter's atmospheric dynamics and this research provides a tool to investigate this phenomenon. Components of the model have been adapted for the...
The explicit planetary isentropic coordinate (EPIC) atmospheric model has been upgraded to use a hybrid vertical coordinate, ζ, that transitions continuously from potential temperature, θ, aloft to a function of a pressure coordinate, σ, that is terrain following near topography. The result is a model that simulates terrestrial and gas-giant atmospheres equally well. Considering that surface pressure...
We combine high-resolution observations of the dynamical behavior of small vortices (diameters ⩽5000km) located at latitude 60°N on Jupiter with forward modeling, using the EPIC atmospheric model, to address two open questions: the dependence of the zonal winds with depth, and the strength of vortices that are too small to apply cloud tracking to their internal structure. The observed drift rates...
The evolution of a large-amplitude disturbance at cloud level in Jupiter's 24° N jet stream in 1990 is used to constrain the vertical structure of a realistic atmospheric model down to the 6 bar pressure level. We use the EPIC model (Dowling et al., 1998, The explicit planetary isentropic-coordinate (EPIC) atmospheric model, Icarus 132, 221–238) to perform long-term, three-dimensional, nonlinear simulations...
Observations of the merger of Jupiter's White Ovals BE and FA show altitude-dependent behavior that we seek to capture in numerical simulations. In particular, it was observed that the upper portions of the vortices orbited each other before merging, but the lower portions translated into each other without orbiting, a phenomenon we term the pair-orbit vertical dichotomy. To reproduce this dichotomy...
We study power spectra and search for planetary waves in images of Jupiter's cloud opacity. The observation wavelength of 4.9 μm senses thermal emission from the ∼5-bar level; overlying clouds attenuate the emission. Our companion paper (J. Harrington, T. E. Dowling, and R. L. Baron, 1996,Icarus124, 22–31) describes 19 nights of observations (6 with 360° longitude coverage) and new reduction techniques...
This paper presents a new Jupiter data set and several new techniques developed for its reduction. A companion paper (J. Harrington, T. E. Dowling, and R. L. Baron, 1996,Icarus124, 32–44) uses these data to study the scales of energy deposition into Jupiter's atmosphere. We observed Jupiter's tropospheric thermal emission at a wavelength of 4.9 μm (1% bandpass) with the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility...
A number of one- and two-layer atmospheric models have been applied to the study of Jupiter's tropospheric circulations over the past two decades in an effort to characterize the basic-state properties of the zonal winds and to study the influence these winds have on the dynamics of long-lived vortices like the Great Red Spot. By singling out the basic state that corresponds to neutral stability with...
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