What is it about?
A giant, swirling wind storm like Jupiter's Great Red Spot is relatively thin in the vertical direction and is shaped like a pancake---the term "lens" is used in oceanography. In contrast, the jet streams themselves are deeply rooted. Such a lens-shaped storm interacts strongly with the jet streams to its north and south and above it, but also with the jet streams beneath it. Previous computer models of the Great Red Spot are distinguished by what guess they each made for the deep jets, which are hidden beneath the cloud tops. This article describes the first model that uses Jupiter's actual deep jets, without guessing, and demonstrates how a swirling storm's cloud-top behavior reveals the nature of the deep jets it is riding over.
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Why is it important?
Jupiter's actual deep jets were not anticipated by any of the guesses made in previous work, but ultimately yielded the secret to how Jupiter's cloud-top jets remain stable for decades at a time.
Perspectives
This paper demonstrates the top-down approach of using the local fluid spin rate (vorticity), as obtained by Voyager, to characterize a gas-giant's deep jet streams, which complements, and predates by over a quarter century, the bottom-up approach of using proximity-orbit gravity data, as obtained by Juno at Jupiter and Cassini at Saturn.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Jupiter's Great Red Spot as a Shallow Water System, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, November 1989, American Meteorological Society,
DOI: 10.1175/1520-0469(1989)0462.0.co;2.
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