Jupiter's Temperature Structure: A Reassessment of the Voyager Radio Occultation Measurements

The thermal structure of planetary atmospheres is an essential input for predicting and retrieving the distribution of gases and aerosols, as well as the bulk chemical abundances. In the case of Jupiter, the temperature at a reference level—generally taken at 1 bar—serves as the anchor in models used to derive the planet’s interior structure and composition. Most models assume the temperature measured by the Galileo probe. However, those data correspond to a single location, an unusually clear, dry region, affected by local atmospheric dynamics. On the other hand, the Voyager radio occultation observations cover a wider range of latitudes, longitudes, and times. The Voyager retrievals were based on atmospheric composition and radio refractivity data that require updating and were never properly tabulated; the few existing tabulations are incomplete and ambiguous. Here we present a systematic electronic digitization of all available temperature profiles from Voyager, followed by their reanalysis, employing currently accepted values of the abundances and radio refractivities of atmospheric species. We find the corrected temperature at the 1 bar level to be up to 4 K greater than the previously published values, i.e., 170.3 ± 3.8 K at 12°S (Voyager 1 ingress) and 167.3 ± 3.8 K at 0°N (Voyager 1 egress). This is to be compared with the Galileo probe value of 166.1 ± 0.8 K at the edge of an unusual feature at 6.°57N. Altogether, this suggests that Jupiter’s tropospheric temperatures may vary spatially by up to 7 K between 7°N and 12°S.