What is it about?
This article describes high-fidelity modeling of the circulations inside Jupiter's Great Red Spot. It shows that many of the detailed cloud patterns seen inside the Great Red Spot are not caused by moist processes, like latent heating and cumulus convection, but rather are the result of dry processes, like fluid shear.
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Why is it important?
The information contained in the shapes and motions of clouds in high-resolution images can be tricky to extract. Complications arise from the actions of waves that move at different speeds than the underlying wind, and from ambiguities about cloud formation and destruction processes. This study helps improves the analysis of gas-giant clouds by distinguishing which details arise from dry versus moist processes.
Perspectives
Amateur astronomers have developed a powerful technique called "lucky imaging", where they take a movie of a planet like Jupiter and discard all but the few percent of frames that happen to have extra-clear images, and then add these together to produce an amazingly clear image. This article can be thought of in a similar vein: "lucky modeling, " in which the model's evolution is caught at its best, before artificial viscosity and numerical artifacts smear out the realistic details.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: Fine-scale matches of model vorticity patterns to prevailing cloud patterns, Icarus, July 2013, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2013.03.026.
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