What is it about?
Most planets have a jet stream that encircles their polar region, but Saturn's north polar jet takes it a step farther: its polar vortex is an almost too-perfect hexagon. This article shows that the natural tendency of jet streams to meander can fairly easily tamp down into a polygon near a gas-giant pole. However, the model pursued here does not match all the features of Saturn's hexagon, suggesting the deep circulation may play a more important role than first realized.
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Why is it important?
Polar vortices act like strong barricades between the polar and midlatitude regions, inhibiting or even preventing trace chemicals from drifting north or south. On Earth and Mars, polar vortices are seasonal, but on gas giants they persist year-round. Understanding these differences is important to the study of global circulations.
Perspectives
The new perspective for Jupiter and Saturn that their jet streams have deep foundations has only just begun to be explored by modelers. We can expect new and exciting discoveries about their abyssal circulations in the future.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emergence of polar-jet polygons from jet instabilities in a Saturn model, Icarus, February 2011, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2010.11.006.
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