Internal heat flow and its effect on the meteorology of Jupiter

Abstract

The author recently published a review of Jovian Meteorology (Ingersoll, 1976a). That review will not be repeated here. This space is therefore devoted to more recent work, at present unpublished, that attempts to link properties of convection in Jupiter's interior with observable features of the atmosphere (Ingersoll and Porco, 1977). The hypothesis is that Jupiter and Saturn owe their banded appearance to poleward internal heat flow, which eliminates differential heating in the atmosphere that would otherwise drive meridional motions. Models of convective heat transport, starting from astrophysical mixing length theory but including effects of rotation (Flaser and Gierasch, 1977), lateral temperature gradients and regions of stable stratification, are studied. Equilibrium solutions for the interior potential temperature variations are obtained as a function of the ratio E of emitted power to absorbed power for the planet as a whole. There are several interesting features of the solutions. The small magnitude (< 0.01°C) of potential temperature variations lends strong support to the hypothesis that internal heat balances the absorbed sunlight at each latitude with no lateral atmospheric heat transport.