The Effects of Waves on the Meridional Thermal Structure of Jupiter’s Stratosphere

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The Effects of Waves on the Meridional Thermal Structure of Jupiter's Stratosphere

Richard G. Cosentino1, Thomas Greathouse2, Amy Simon3, Rohini Giles2, Raúl Morales-Juberías4, Leigh N. Fletcher5 and Glenn Orton6

Published 2020 November 10 • © 2020. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.

The Planetary Science Journal, Volume 1, Number 3

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Author affiliations

1 Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

2 Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX 78238, USA

3 Solar System Exploration Div., NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA

4 Physics Department, New Mexico Institute of Technology, Socorro, NM 87801, USA

5 School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK

6 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA

ORCID iDs

Richard G. Cosentino https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3047-615X

Thomas Greathouse https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6613-5731

Amy Simon https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4641-6186

Rohini Giles https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7665-6562

Leigh N. Fletcher https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5834-9588

Glenn Orton https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7871-2823

Dates

Received 2020 June 16

Accepted 2020 September 30

Published 2020 November 10

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Citation

Richard G. Cosentino et al 2020 Planet. Sci. J. 1 63

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/abbda3

Keywords

Jupiter ; Stratosphere ; Infrared observatories

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Abstract

A thermal oscillation in Jupiter's equatorial stratosphere, thought to have ~4 Earth year period, was first discovered in 7.8 μm imaging observations from the 1980s and 1990s. Such imaging observations were sensitive to the 10–20 hPa pressure region in the atmosphere. More recent 7.8 μm long-slit high-spectroscopic observations from 2012 to 2017 taken using the Texas Echelon cross-dispersed Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES), mounted on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), have vertically resolved this phenomenon's structure, and show that it spans a range of pressure from 2 to 20 hPa. The TEXES instrument was mounted on the Gemini North telescope in March 2017, improving the diffraction-limited spatial resolution by a factor of ~2.5 compared with that offered by the IRTF. This Gemini spatial scale sensitivity study was performed in support of the longer-termed Jupiter monitoring being performed at the IRTF. We find that the spatial resolution afforded by the smaller 3 m IRTF is sufficient to spatially resolve the 3D structure of Jupiter's equatorial stratospheric oscillation by comparing the thermal retrievals of IRTF and Gemini observations. We then performed numerical simulations in a general circulation model to investigate how the structure of Jupiter's stratosphere responds to changes in the latitudinal extent of wave forcing in the troposphere. We find our simulations produce a lower limit in meridional wave forcing of ±7° (planetocentric coordinates) centered about the equator. This likely remains constant over time to produce off-equatorial thermal oscillations at ±13°, consistent with observations spanning nearly four decades.