J.F. Sanz-Requena

Deep winds beneath Saturn/'s upper clouds from a seasonal long-lived planetary-scale storm

Convective storms occur regularly in Saturn’s atmosphere. Huge storms known as Great White Spots, which are ten times larger than the regular storms, are rarer and occur about once per Saturnian year (29.5 Earth years). Current models propose that the outbreak of a Great White Spot is due to moist convection induced by water. However, the generation of the global disturbance and its effect on Saturn’s permanent winds have hitherto been unconstrained by data, because there was insufficient spatial resolution and temporal sampling to infer the dynamics of Saturn’s weather layer (the layer in the troposphere where the cloud forms). Theoretically, it has been suggested that this phenomenon is seasonally controlled. Here we report observations of a storm at northern latitudes in the peak of a weak westward jet during the beginning of northern springtime, in accord with the seasonal cycle but earlier than expected. The storm head moved faster than the jet, was active during the two-month observation period, and triggered a planetary-scale disturbance that circled Saturn but did not significantly alter the ambient zonal winds. Numerical simulations of the phenomenon show that, as on Jupiter, Saturn’s winds extend without decay deep down into the weather layer, at least to the water-cloud base at pressures of 10–12 bar, which is much deeper than solar radiation penetrates.

An Enduring Rapidly Moving Storm as a Guide to Saturn's Equatorial Jet's Complex Structure

Saturn has an intense and broad eastward equatorial jet with a complex three-dimensional structure mixed with time variability. The equatorial region experiences strong seasonal insolation variations enhanced by ring shadowing, and three of the six known giant planetary-scale storms have developed in it. These factors make Saturns equator a natural laboratory to test models of jets in giant planets. Here we report on a bright equatorial atmospheric feature imaged in 2015 that moved steadily at a high speed of 450 ms−1 not measured since 1980–1981 with other equatorial clouds moving within an ample range of velocities. Radiative transfer models show that these motions occur at three altitude levels within the upper haze and clouds. We find that the peak of the jet (latitudes 10° N to 10° S) suffers intense vertical shears reaching +2.5 ms−1 km−1, two orders of magnitude higher than meridional shears, and temporal variability above 1 bar altitude level.

Spectral comparison and stability of red regions on Jupiter

A rare red cyclone visible on Jupiter in 1994 and 1995 falls in a class of vortices that are intensely colored, yet low altitude, unlike the Great Red Spot (GRS). Dynamical modeling indicates that the presence of nearby anticyclones both aids in formation and lead to the destruction of the cyclone. A study of absolute spectral reflectance from Hubble Space Telescope imaging data shows that GRS is not typically the “reddest” region of the planet. Rather, transient red cyclones and the reddest parts of the North Equatorial Belt show less reflectance than the GRS at all wavelengths, with enhanced absorption at wavelengths near 500 nm. Temporal analysis shows that the darkest regions of the North Equatorial Belt and transient red cyclones are relatively constant in color from 1995 to 2014, while the spectral slope and absolute brightness of the GRS core vary over time. Laboratory data of colored materials that yield a good qualitative fit to the GRS spectrum do not match the spectra of other regions, and wavelengths from 400 to 700 nm may be most diagnostic of chromophore identification.