Jet Streams: A Review

What is it about?

Jet streams blow eastward and westward in all the major atmospheres in the Solar System and have a profound effect on weather and climate. Comparative planetology has illuminated the mechanisms that form and maintain jet streams. The four top challenges in the field are discussed (nonlinearity, nonintuitive waves, non-constant-coefficient differential equations, and the profusion of nondimensional numbers), and then jets are compared and contrasted between Earth and the planets for the three dynamically distinct regions of an atmosphere: the equatorial, midlatitude, and polar regions.

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Why is it important?

The long-range coherence of a jet stream defies everyday experience; for example, no one can blow out the candles on a birthday cake from across a room, yet jet streams maintain such a level of coherence as they encircle a planet. In addition to occurring in atmospheres and oceans (like the Gulf Stream), jets also occur in engineering systems. In fact, arguably the most significant advancement in the development of fusion electricity, the low-to-high (LH) confinement transition in fusion reactors (tokamaks and stellarators), is associated with the appearance of jets that are analogous to the east-west jets in planetary atmospheres.

Perspectives