What is it about?
The impact of fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter's atmosphere was predicted far enough in advance to allow model forecasts of what might happen. We used the EPIC global model of Jupiter's atmosphere to forecast atmospheric buoyancy waves---analogous to making waves by throwing a rock into a pond---and to see if such impacts might leave behind a swirling storm.
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Why is it important?
Comet impacts provide a natural experiment to test attributes of a fluid envelope (an atmosphere or ocean) that are not otherwise accessible by remote sensing. Our results showed that it was plausible to expect to see observable waves emanating from the impact sites, and that the speed of these waves could reveal the effective thickness of Jupiter's troposphere below the cloud tops, which is a key parameter in many models that is not readily observable. Our simulations also predicted there would be no long-lasting wind storms from the impacts.
Perspectives
The EPIC atmospheric model was developed from scratch at MIT in the early 1990s, and these comet-impact experiments were the model's first published application. They landed on the cover of Nature, which is a not bad for a debut. The prediction that there would be no long-lasting storms from the impacts proved to be true.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Dynamic response of Jupiter's atmosphere to the impact of comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, Nature, April 1994, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/368525a0.
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