A Wider and Deeper View of Jupiter’s Jets – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: AGU Advances

Although the east-west jets in Jupiter’s atmosphere have been observed for centuries, the forces driving them have been unclear. One important complication is that the circulation pattern is “deep” (extending to a few thousand kilometers depth) rather than “shallow” (like the Earth’s approximately 10 kilometer thick atmosphere).

Duer et al. [2023] use a deep circulation model to show that turbulence arising in part from overturning convection cells can explain the mid-latitude jets on Jupiter. The existence of such deep cells is consistent with NASA’s Juno radiometer data. Future studies will likely apply similar arguments to Saturn’s jets, where fewer observational constraints are available, and attempt to improve the underlying models (such as using more realistic boundary conditions).

Citation: Duer, K., Galanti, E., & Kaspi, Y. (2023). Gas giant simulations of eddy-driven jets accompanied by deep meridional circulation. AGU Advances, 4, e2023AV000908. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023AV000908

—Francis Nimmo, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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