Tempests in the troposphere: Mapping the impact of giant storms on Jupiter's deep atmosphere

Creators: Moeckel, Chris¹; Ge, Huazhi²; de Pater, Imke¹

1. University of California, Berkeley
2. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Storms are emerging as key drivers in shaping hydrogen-dominated atmospheres. Trace gas condensation can suppress convection and disrupt the distribution of energy and material in hydrogen atmospheres. On Jupiter, the presence of water has been invoked to control the occurrence of large-scale storms; however, the impact of storms on the ammonia and temperature distribution is unknown. We use Juno Microwave Radiometer observations of a large-scale storm in 2017 to study the aftermath of such a storm on the atmosphere. Anomalies in the retrieved ammonia abundance and atmospheric temperature show how storms deplete and heat the upper atmosphere while simultaneously depositing material well below the layers they were triggered at. These observations, aided by simulations, show that the water and ammonia cycles are coupled and that their combined effect plays a key role in explaining the depletion of ammonia in the tropospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

Copyright and License

© 2025 the Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).

Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge A. Hussain for early exploration of this storm system during undergraduate research, where the cloud structure using the correlated-k method was studied. Although the method proved unsuitable for this specific application, the efforts were instrumental in guiding the development of the deconvolution algorithm, which became a cornerstone of this work.

Funding

C.M. and I.d.P. were in part supported by the NASA’s Solar System Observations (SSO) award 80NSSC18K1003.

Contributions

Conceptualization: C.M. and I.d.P. Methodology: C.M. and I.d.P. Investigation: C.M. and H.G. Visualization: C.M. Supervision: I.d.P. Data curation: C.M., H.G., and I.d.P. Formal analysis: C.M. and H.G. Software: C.M. and H.G. Writing—review and editing: C.M. and I.d.P. Writing—original draft: C.M. Resources: I.d.P. Funding acquisition: I.d.P. Project administration: C.M. and I.d.P. Validation: C.M. and I.d.P.

Data Availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. The raw data of the Juno MWR instrument can be accessed at https://pds-atmospheres.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/getdir.pl?volume=jnomwr_1100. The fully open and independent data pipeline to reduce the data and produce the deprojected maps can be accessed at https://github.com/cmoeckel91/pyPR/blob/master/JunoTools.py, and the reduced data are also available at https://zenodo.org/records/14908671.

Supplemental Material

Figs. S1 to S5 (PDF)

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