A team of scientists shows where some of the gas giant’s huge storms come from and how the process is similar to the buildup of extreme weather on our planet.
just been studying the swirling waters of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, when she happened to come across a poster image of cyclones around Jupiter’s north pole, taken by NASA’s. “I looked at it, and I was just struck: ‘Whoa, this looks just like turbulence in the ocean,’” she says.
It’s a clever way to study extreme weather on a planet that’s more than 500 million miles away. “The authors are clearly drawing from meteorology and oceanography disciplines. These folks are taking this rich literature and applying it in sophisticated ways to a planet we can barely touch,” says Morgan O’Neill, a Stanford atmospheric scientist who models the physics of hurricanes and tornadoes on Earth and has applied her work to Saturn.
Siegelman and her team took advantage of images from the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper, or JIRAM, an instrument aboard Juno that was funded by the Italian Space Agency. The camera resolved Jupiter’s clouds into pixels of about 10 miles per side, and, thanks to its infrared capabilities, it probed heat radiation too. “High clouds look cold, and holes in the clouds and deeper clouds look warm. So you can use temperature as a measure of uplift, whether there has been a rising or sinking motion.
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