What is it about?
The giant, swirling storms on Jupiter can last a lifetime or longer. When two high-pressure storms get close enough, they tend to merge together. The details of such an event between the decades-old White Ovals BE and FA revealed that their bottoms merged first, while their tops continued to orbit each other before finally merging. This study uses the EPIC model to simulate this play-by-play evolution and to deduce the environmental conditions affecting the storms.
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Why is it important?
Planetary scale features in an atmosphere, like jet streams and swirling storms, form from smaller eddies via complicated processes that are poorly understood.
Perspectives
This is an example of observations providing exquisite detail on a storm merger event, which allowed numerical modeling to distinguish which environmental conditions could support the observed sequence of events.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: EPIC simulations of the merger of Jupiter's White Ovals BE and FA: altitude-dependent behavior, Icarus, November 2003, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2003.08.009.
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