Comparing Jovian Turbulence And Earth’s Phytoplankton Blooms
The left image shows a close-up of a phytoplankton blooming in the southern Gulf of Bothnia, in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland on April 14, 2019. The right image shows turbulent clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Jupiter’s atmosphere is one of the most turbulent places in the solar system. Orbiting Jupiter and its 79 moons is NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which sends images from the largest planet in our solar system back to researchers on Earth. These images from Juno have given oceanographers the raw materials to study the rich turbulence at Jupiter’s poles and the physical forces that drive large cyclones on Jupiter.
Lia Siegelman, a physical oceanographer and postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, observed similarities between the richness of turbulence around Jovian cyclones and the filaments around smaller eddies with turbulence seen in Earth’s oceans.
More information about Juno is at https://www.nasa.gov/juno and https://missionjuno.swri.edu.
