What is it about?
Turbulence in the atmosphere of a rotating planet behaves differently from everyday experience with fluids, such as pouring cream into coffee. Instead of folding into ever smaller swirls in three dimensions, in an atmosphere, eddies tend to merge together horizontally, then straighten out and form jet streams. This study examines this process for different latitudes on Jupiter.
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Why is it important?
Consider that no one can stand across a room from a birthday cake and blow out the candles, yet jet streams in atmospheres hold themselves together while encircling an entire planet. Studies like this help to uncover the complicated processes at work that form and maintain jet streams.
Perspectives
Juno at Jupiter and Cassini at Saturn have produced gravity field evidence that the jet streams on these two gas giants are about as deep as they are wide. These proximity orbit results go beyond the considerations in this paper to add a new piece to the puzzle of what controls the spacing of jet streams in gas giant atmospheres.
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Emergence of Multiple Robust Zonal Jets from Freely Evolving, Three-Dimensional Stratified Geostrophic Turbulence with Applications to Jupiter, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, December 2008, American Meteorological Society,
DOI: 10.1175/2008jas2558.1.
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