Moist convection drives an upscale energy transfer at Jovian high latitudes

Siegelman, Lia and Klein, Patrice and Ingersoll, Andrew P. and Ewald, Shawn P. and Young, William R. and Bracco, Annalisa and Mura, Alessandro and Adriani, Alberto and Grassi, Davide and Plainaki, Christina and Sindoni, Giuseppe (2022) Moist convection drives an upscale energy transfer at Jovian high latitudes. Nature Physics, 18 (3). pp. 357-361. ISSN 1745-2473. doi:10.1038/s41567-021-01458-y. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20220111-769329200

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Abstract

Jupiter’s atmosphere is one of the most turbulent places in the solar system. Whereas observations of lightning and thunderstorms point to moist convection as a small-scale energy source for Jupiter’s large-scale vortices and zonal jets, this has never been demonstrated due to the coarse resolution of pre-Juno measurements. The Juno spacecraft discovered that Jovian high latitudes host a cluster of large cyclones with diameter of around 5,000 km, each associated with intermediate- (roughly between 500 and 1,600 km) and smaller-scale vortices and filaments of around 100 km. Here, we analyse infrared images from Juno with a high resolution of 10 km. We unveil a dynamical regime associated with a significant energy source of convective origin that peaks at 100 km scales and in which energy gets subsequently transferred upscale to the large circumpolar and polar cyclones. Although this energy route has never been observed on another planet, it is surprisingly consistent with idealized studies of rapidly rotating Rayleigh–Bénard convection, lending theoretical support to our analyses. This energy route is expected to enhance the heat transfer from Jupiter’s hot interior to its troposphere and may also be relevant to the Earth’s atmosphere, helping us better understand the dynamics of our own planet.

Item Type:

Article

Related URLs:

URL	URL Type	Description
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01458-y	DOI	Article
https://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/PDS4/juno_jiram_bundle/data_calibrated/	Related Item	JIRAM data
https://github.com/liasiegelman/JIRAM_paper_code	Related Item	Code

ORCID:

Author	ORCID
Siegelman, Lia	0000-0003-3330-082X
Klein, Patrice	0000-0002-3089-3896
Ingersoll, Andrew P.	0000-0002-2035-9198
Ewald, Shawn P.	0000-0002-1567-9154
Young, William R.	0000-0002-1842-3197
Bracco, Annalisa	0000-0002-1619-6103
Mura, Alessandro	0000-0002-4552-4292
Adriani, Alberto	0000-0003-4998-8008
Grassi, Davide	0000-0003-1653-3066
Plainaki, Christina	0000-0003-1483-5052
Sindoni, Giuseppe	0000-0002-3348-7930

Additional Information:

© The Author(s) 2022. 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 license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license 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 license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 19 April 2021; Accepted 09 November 2021; Published 10 January 2022. A portion of this work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), grant/cooperative agreement no. 80NSSC20K0555, and a contract with the Juno mission, which is administered for NASA by the Southwest Research Institute. L.S. was first supported by a Caltech-JPL postdoctoral research grant and then by the Scripps Institutional Postdoctoral Program. P.K. acknowledges funding from JPL/NASA. A.P.I. is supported by NASA funds to the Juno project and by NSF grant number 1411952. W.R.Y. and A.B. acknowledge funding from NSF. The JIRAM project is founded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) through ASI INAF agreements no. I/010/10/0, 2014 050 R.0, 2016-23-H.0 and 2016-23-H.1-2018. We thank A. Sánchez-Lavega and two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which helped improve the manuscript. Data availability: JIRAM data are available at the Planetary Data System (PDS) online (https://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/PDS4/juno_jiram_bundle/data_calibrated/). Data products used in this study include calibrated, geometrically controlled, radiance data mapped onto an orthographic projection centred on the north pole and velocity vectors derived from the radiance data. The raw data used in this study are listed in the Extended Data Table 1. Brightness maps and velocity vectors can be found in the Supplementary Data. Code availability: The code is available at https://github.com/liasiegelman/JIRAM_paper_code. Author Contributions: L.S. and P.K. led the data analysis and data interpretation and drafted the manuscript. S.P.E. processed the infrared brightness maps and wind vectors. A.P.I., S.P.E., W.R.Y. and A.B. contributed to the scientific interpretation of the results. A.M., A.A., D.G., C.P. and G.S. provided expertise on the JIRAM instrument. All authors reviewed the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Physics thanks Agustín Sánchez-Lavega and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Funders:

Funding Agency	Grant Number
NASA/JPL/Caltech	UNSPECIFIED
NASA	80NSSC20K0555
Southwest Research Institute	UNSPECIFIED
Scripps Institution of Oceanography	UNSPECIFIED
NSF	AST-1411952
Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI)	I/010/10/0
Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI)	2014 050 R.0
Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI)	2016-23-H.0
Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI)	2016-23-H.1-2018

Subject Keywords:

Fluid dynamics; Giant planets

Issue or Number:

DOI:

10.1038/s41567-021-01458-y

Record Number:

CaltechAUTHORS:20220111-769329200

Persistent URL:

https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20220111-769329200

Official Citation:

Siegelman, L., Klein, P., Ingersoll, A.P. et al. Moist convection drives an upscale energy transfer at Jovian high latitudes. Nat. Phys. 18, 357–361 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01458-y

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ID Code:

112829

Collection:

CaltechAUTHORS

Deposited By:

Tony Diaz

Deposited On:

11 Jan 2022 21:50

Last Modified:

25 Jul 2022 23:14

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