Deep, Closely-Packed, Long-Lived Cyclones on Jupiter’s Poles
Tao Cai, Kwing L. Chan, Hans G. Mayr
Juno Mission to Jupiter has found closely-packed cyclones at the planet’s two poles. The observation that these cyclones coexist in very confined space, with outer rims almost touching each other but without merging, poses a big puzzle. In this work, we present numerical calculations showing that convectively sustained, closely-packed cyclones can form and survive without merging for a very long time in polar region of a deep rotating convection zone (for thousands of planetary rotation periods). Through an idealized application of the inertial stability criterion for axisymmetric circulations, it is found that the large Coriolis parameter near the pole plays a crucial role in allowing the cyclones to be packed closely.
Comments: Accepted to the Planetary Science Journal; 15 figures, 3 movies
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph); Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn); Geophysics (physics.geo-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2103.08824 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2103.08824v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Tao Cai
[v1] Tue, 16 Mar 2021 03:20:41 UTC (37,019 KB)
