PlanetarySeminar: Observations and numerical modelling of Jupiter’s atmospheric phenomena

At 14:00 on Wednesday May 12th, 2021, Peio Iñurrigarro from the University of the Basque Country will be presenting a virtual seminar titled: “Observations and numerical modelling of Jupiter’s atmospheric phenomena”. This seminar will be accessible via Teams.

Title: “Observations and numerical modelling of Jupiter’s atmospheric phenomena”

Abstract: “Jupiter’s atmosphere is permanently covered by clouds that display a wide variety of atmospheric phenomena visible from Earth even with small-size telescopes or at exquisite detail with telescopes such as Hubble or the ongoing Juno mission. These phenomena have sizes that range from local to planetary scale and their interactions are not well known. These include long-lived large cyclones and anticyclones, atmospheric waves of planetary, mesoscale and small scale, convective storms, eddies and turbulent regions. In Jupiter, cyclones and anticyclones of different sizes and lifetimes are usually observed, including the Great Red Spot, the biggest and oldest anticyclone of the Solar System, which has recently suffered some dramatic interactions with several smaller anticyclones.
Moist convective storms are frequent in Jupiter and can develop atmospheric activity at multiple scales. Most of the storms are small and of short duration, apparently not producing long-standing observable effects on their surroundings. Some other less frequent storms arise inside larger meteorological structures strongly affecting their local region, such as in the 2018 and 2020 storms of Jupiter’s South Temperate Belt, where a convective storm started inside a preexisting cyclone at that latitude. The largest and most powerful convective storms occur in cycles of several years and they can grow to develop planetary-scale disturbances producing dramatic changes in the entire latitude bands where they develop.
In this talk I will focus on some of the convective atmospheric phenomena developed in the planet during the last few years. These events have been analyzed with a combination of ground-based and spacecraft-based observations with detailed comparisons with numerical simulations of the events using the Explicit Planetary Isentropic-Coordinate (EPIC) model. The talk will also cover the simulations of the onset and initial development of convective storms in Jupiter under different conditions performed with the Anelastic Model of Moist Convection (AMMC), a three-dimensional cloud resolving model able to reproduce the details of the updrafts.”