New research led by Lia Siegelman, a physical oceanographer at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has found similarities between the geophysical processes at Jupiter’s polar regions and those on Earth, which could help improve our understanding of these processes on our own planet. This discovery was made when Siegelman noticed similarities between images of Jupiter’s cyclones and ocean turbulence she was studying, leading her to compare air and water as both being considered fluids. By applying ocean physics to Jupiter, Siegelman found striking similarities.
A study published in Nature Physics in 2022 analyzed high-resolution infrared images of Jupiter’s cyclones taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The analysis showed that a type of convection similar to Earth’s helps maintain Jupiter’s massive storms, which can be thousands of miles wide and last for years. Siegelman also observed wispy tendrils, known as filaments, between the storms, which she found shared similarities with oceanic and atmospheric processes on Earth. Her research delves deeper into the role of these filaments in maintaining Jupiter’s storms.
Siegelman’s study, funded by Scripps and the National Science Foundation, found additional similarities between the processes fueling Jupiter’s cyclones and those on Earth. The filaments between Jupiter’s cyclones act with convection to promote and sustain the planet’s giant storms, resembling oceanographic and meteorological fronts on Earth. Fronts are boundaries between gas or liquid masses with different densities due to temperature or salinity differences. The leading edges of fronts have strong vertical velocities that create winds or currents, and are a key feature in weather forecasting.
Using infrared images from Juno to track the movement of clouds and filaments across 30-second intervals, Siegelman and her co-author Patrice Klein were able to calculate horizontal wind speeds, subsequently determining temperatures and calculating vertical wind speeds. This allowed them to find that Jupiter’s filaments behave like fronts on Earth, playing a significant role in transporting energy in the form of heat from the planet’s core to its upper atmosphere. The filaments account for a quarter of the total kinetic energy powering Jupiter’s cyclones and forty percent of the vertical heat transport.
The persistence of cyclones on Jupiter’s poles since first observed in 2016 is sustained by filaments in between the large vortices, despite their relatively small size. Siegelman emphasizes the importance of fronts and convection in sustaining these cyclones on both Earth and Jupiter, suggesting that similar processes may exist on other fluid bodies in the universe. The immense scale of Jupiter and high-resolution imagery from Juno provide a clearer visualization of how smaller-scale phenomena like fronts connect to larger ones like cyclones and the atmosphere.
In conclusion, Siegelman’s research highlights the cosmic beauty of finding physical mechanisms on Earth that also exist on planets millions of miles away. This discovery can help us better understand not only the processes on Jupiter but also those on our own planet, shedding light on the interconnectedness of geophysical processes across different celestial bodies. With the advancement of technology and methods like those used in this study, we can gain a deeper understanding of the complex interactions that drive weather systems and climates on Earth and beyond.