Journal article : Review
The turbulent dynamics of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s weather layers: order out of chaos?
- Abstract:
- The weather layers of the gas giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, comprise the shallow atmospheric layers that are influenced energetically by a combination of incoming solar radiation and localised latent heating of condensates, as well as by upwelling heat from their planetary interiors. They are also the most accessible regions of those planets to direct observations. Recent analyses in Oxford of cloud-tracked winds on Jupiter have demonstrated that kinetic energy is injected into the weather layer at scales comparable to the Rossby radius of deformation and cascades both upscale, mostly into the extra-tropical zonal jets, and downscale to the smallest resolvable scales in Cassini images. The large-scale flow on both Jupiter and Saturn appears to equilibrate towards a state which is close to marginal instability according to Arnol’d’s 2nd stability theorem. This scenario is largely reproduced in a hierarchy of numerical models of giant planet weather layers, including relatively realistic models which seek to predict thermal and dynamical structures using a full set of parameterisations of radiative transfer, interior heat sources and even moist convection. Such models include (amongst others) the Jason GCM, developed in Oxford, which also represents the formation of (energetically passive) clouds of NH3, NH4SH and H2O condensates and the transport of condensable tracers. Recent results show some promise in comparison with observations from the Cassini and Juno missions, but some observed features (such as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and other compact ovals) are not yet captured spontaneously by most weather layer models. We review recent work in this vein and discuss a number of open questions for future study.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 2.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s40562-020-00159-3
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Geoscience Letters More from this journal
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 10
- Publication date:
- 2020-07-09
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-06-26
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2196-4092
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subtype:
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Review
- Pubs id:
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1120995
- Local pid:
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pubs:1120995
- Deposit date:
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2021-04-21
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- PL Read et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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