Vertical Distribution of Particles in the Jovian Great Red SPOT

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

The vertical distribution of particles at the Great Red Spot was derived from radiative transfer models applied to ground based CCD images. The observations were carried out in two differents dates: on June 1993 at the 1.5-m Spanish Telescope in Calar Alto (Spain), and on July 1994 at the William Herschel Telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain. The images were obtained using narrow-band filters centered at 3700 (150), 4500 (150), 5430 (100), 6350 (50), 8920 (50) and 9480 (50) { Angstroms}. Also a standard U filter was used. The GRS was tracked at different geometries as the spot moved from limb to limb. For each image we obtained the frame coordinates of central part of the GRS and we computed the average intensity in a region of 2" x 2.5" centered at that point. The images were calibrated in reflectivity using the geometric albedo obtained in 1993 by Karkoschka (Icarus 111, 174--192, 1994). These reflectivity measurements have been analyzed in terms of multiple scattering radiative transfer models. We have assumed a four-layer atmospheric model whose best fit was found for the following distribution: the first layer is located from 100 to 700 mbar with a column density of 2.3 x 10(8) cm(-2) and a modal radius varying between 0.18 and 0.6 mu m, the second layer is located between 700 and 890 mbar with 10(8) cm(-2) particles of 1 mu m in modal radius, the third layer is clear gas, and the fourth layer is a semi-infinite cloud characterized by a two-term Henyey-Greestein phase function with parameters g1= 0.8 g2 = --0.8 f1s = 0.969, and a single scattering albedo of 0.997 is placed at the 1750-mbar level. The imaginary refractive indices vary between 0.0073 at UV and 5 x 10^{-5}$ for the {9000- Angstroms} region. Significant differences between these imaginary indices and those obtained from UV photolysis of mixtures of phosphine in H obtained by Noy et al. (J. Geophys. Res. 86, 11,985--11,988) were found.

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