What is it about?
Jupiter's many jet streams are so fast and so sharp that they strongly violate all the stable configurations commonly described in textbooks, and yet they blow in straight lines eastward and westward without any of the meandering that is so common in Earth's jet streams. Jupiter's trick is to tame its longest atmospheric waves in a particular manner that this article explains, using a specific example of how these waves interact with a Jupiter-like jet stream profile that alternates eastward and westward sinusoidally with respect to latitude.
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Why is it important?
The on-off switch for shear instability has not yet been found mathematically. This article finds the on-off switch for the important case of a jet stream profile that alternates sinusoidally eastward and westward with respect to latitude. The key parameter turns out to be the analog of the Mach number for giant atmospheric waves, which greatly clarifies how to proceed to handle the general case.
Perspectives
This is an example of a significant result developed during the Woods Hole Summer Program in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Jupiter's winds and Arnol'd's second stability theorem: Slowly moving waves and neutral stability, Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, January 1993, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1029/93je01520.
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