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My name is Amy Simon Miller and I study the atmospheres of the jovian planets.
Whether on Jupiter is confined to a rather thin layer kind of high up in the
atmosphere. So the tops of the clouds are what we're seeing when we look at
Jupiter. One thing we're seeing in the southern part of the equatorial region
is little v-shaped clouds or Chevron's and we wanted to understand how those
are moving in the atmosphere. What we think Chevron's are are simply holes in
the clouds there are simply areas where we don't see any bright white clouds. The
Cassini mission flew by Jupiter in the year 2000 and because it was a slow
distant flyby we got a lot of coverage of the planet over a long time period. So
we were able to put those images together and make movies. What we found
by looking at the movies is that they're not just moving from east to west
they're moving up and down tracing out what's called a Rossby wave. We have
these on Earth as well. In particular we see them around the poles they're
circumpolar Jets and we can also see them in the jet streams at mid-latitudes.
Jet streams on Earth typically flow from west to east, but sometimes you can see
them meandering from north to south. And that's a signature of Rossby waves here on Earth.
These meanders can sometimes grow stronger and that can lead to everyday
weather changes such as the passage of fronts or storms being generated. For
most people what we really want to understand is whether on Earth and what
are the things that affect weather on Earth. Now Jupiter and Earth are very
different planets. We don't have land and we don't have
seasons on Jupiter. On the other hand we see very similar weather phenomenon. So
being able to understand and study another planet teach us a lot more about
what's common in an atmosphere on the Earth.
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