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Condensable species are crucial in shaping planetary climate. A wide range of planetary climate systems involve understanding non-dilute condensable substances and their influence on climate dynamics. There has been progress on large-scale…
The nature of the flow below the cloud level on Jupiter and Saturn is still unknown. Relating the flow on these planets to perturbations in their density field is key to the analysis of the gravity measurements expected from both the Juno…
The polar regions of Jupiter host a myriad of dynamically interesting phenomena including vortex configurations, folded-filamentary regions (FFRs), and chaotic flows. Juno observations have provided unprecedented views of the high…
The evolution of a single raindrop falling below a cloud is governed by fluid dynamics and thermodynamics fundamentally transferable to planetary atmospheres beyond modern Earth's. Here, we show how three properties that characterize…
Compositional convection is atmospheric mixing driven by density variations caused by compositional gradients. Previous studies have suggested that compositional gradients of atmospheric trace species within planetary atmospheres can impact…
Super-Earths and mini-Neptunes are the most common types of exoplanets discovered, yet the physics of their formation are still debated. Standard core accretion models in gas-rich environment find that typical mini-Neptune mass planets…
During 2016-17 the Juno and Cassini spacecraft will both perform close eccentric orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, obtaining high-precision gravity measurements for these planets. This data will be used to estimate the depth of…
The interior flux of a giant planet impacts atmospheric motion, and the atmosphere dictates the interior's cooling. Here we use a non-hydrostatic general circulation model (Simulating Nonhydrostatic Atmospheres on Planets, SNAP) coupled…
We obtained the first maps of Jupiter at 1-3 mm wavelength with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) on 3-5 January 2017, just days after an energetic eruption at 16.5S jovigraphic latitude had been reported by the…
Jupiter's tropospheric ammonia (NH\textsubscript{3}) abundance is studied using spatially-resolved 5-\textmu m observations from CRIRES, a high resolution spectrometer at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The high…
Jupiter's weather layer exhibits long-term and quasi-periodic cycles of meteorological activity that can completely change the appearance of its belts and zones. There are cycles with intervals from 4 to 9 years, dependent on the latitude,…
We present a method to calculate vertical profiles of particle size distributions in condensation clouds of giant planets and brown dwarfs. The method assumes a balance between turbulent diffusion and sedimentation in horizontally uniform…
Atmospheric convection behaves differently in hydrogen-rich atmospheres compared to higher mean molecular weight atmospheres due to compositional gradients of tracers. Previous 1D studies predict that when a condensible tracer exceeds a…
Jupiter's internal flow structure is still not fully known, but can be now better constrained due to Juno's high-precision measurements. The recently published gravity and magnetic field measurements have led to new information regarding…
Recent surveys have revealed that planets intermediate in size between Earth and Neptune ("super-Earths") are among the most common planets in the Galaxy. Atmospheric studies are the next step toward developing a comprehensive understanding…
Motivated by the observational evidence of inhomogeneous clouds in exoplanetary atmospheres, we investigate how proposed simple cloud distributions can affect atmospheric circulations and infrared emission. We simulated temperatures and…
The intriguing circumpolar cyclone pattern at Jupiter's poles raises fundamental questions about how these systems are organized vertically and, further, how the planet's internal heat shapes and sustains them in the absence of solar…
Jupiter's atmosphere-interior is a coupled fluid dynamical system strongly influenced by the rapid background rotation. While the visible atmosphere features east-west zonal winds on the order of 100 m/s (Tollefson et al. 2017), zonal flows…
We present an analytic 1-D radiative-convective model of the thermal structure of planetary atmospheres. Our model assumes that thermal radiative transfer is gray and can be represented by the two-stream approximation. Model atmospheres are…
Convection in the solar interior is thought to comprise structures on a spectrum of scales. This conclusion emerges from phenomenological studies and numerical simulations, though neither covers the proper range of dynamical parameters of…