Jupiter's atmosphere is dominated by multiple jet streams which are strongly tied to its 3D atmospheric circulation. Lacking a rigid bottom boundary, several models exist for how the meridional circulation extends into the planetary interior. Here we show, collecting evidence from multiple instruments of the Juno mission, the existence of mid-latitudinal meridional circulation cells which are driven by turbulence, similar to the Ferrel cells on Earth. Different than Earth, which contains only one such cell in each hemisphere, the larger, faster rotating Jupiter can incorporate multiple cells. The cells form regions of upwelling and downwelling, which we show are clearly evident in Juno's microwave data between latitude 60S and 60N. The existence of these cells is confirmed by reproducing the ammonia observations using a simplistic model. This study solves a long-standing puzzle regarding the nature of Jupiter's sub-cloud dynamics and provides evidence for 8 cells in each Jovian hemisphere.
@article{arxiv.2110.07255,
title = {Evidence for multiple Ferrel-like cells on Jupiter},
author = {Keren Duer and Nimrod Gavriel and Eli Galanti and Yohai Kaspi and Leigh N. Fletcher and Tristan Guillot and Scott J. Bolton and Steven M. Levin and Sushil K. Atreya and Davide Grassi and Andrew P. Ingersoll and Cheng Li and Liming Li and Jonathan I. Lunine and Glenn S. Orton and Fabiano A. Oyafuso and J. Hunter Waite},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.07255},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
13 pages, 5 figures, Supporting information. Accepted to Geophysical Research Letters