WEBVTT
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Language: en

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Music

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My name is Amy Simon Miller and I study
the atmospheres of the jovian planets.

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Whether on Jupiter is confined to a
rather thin layer kind of high up in the

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atmosphere. So the tops of the clouds are
what we're seeing when we look at

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Jupiter. One thing we're seeing in the
southern part of the equatorial region

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is little v-shaped clouds or Chevron's
and we wanted to understand how those

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are moving in the atmosphere. What we
think Chevron's are are simply holes in

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the clouds there are simply areas where
we don't see any bright white clouds. The

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Cassini mission flew by Jupiter in the
year 2000 and because it was a slow

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distant flyby we got a lot of coverage
of the planet over a long time period. So

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we were able to put those images
together and make movies. What we found

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by looking at the movies is that they're
not just moving from east to west

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they're moving up and down tracing out
what's called a Rossby wave. We have

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these on Earth as well. In particular we
see them around the poles they're

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circumpolar Jets and we can also see
them in the jet streams at mid-latitudes.

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Jet streams on Earth typically flow from
west to east, but sometimes you can see

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them meandering from north to south.
And that's a signature of Rossby waves here on Earth.

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These meanders can sometimes grow
stronger and that can lead to everyday

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weather changes such as the passage of
fronts or storms being generated. For

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most people what we really want to
understand is whether on Earth and what

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are the things that affect weather on
Earth. Now Jupiter and Earth are very

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different planets.
We don't have land and we don't have

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seasons on Jupiter. On the other hand we
see very similar weather phenomenon. So

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being able to understand and study
another planet teach us a lot more about

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what's common in an atmosphere on the
Earth.

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Music

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Beep, Beep, Beep