Cassini ISS Observations of Saturn's Great White Spot Storm 2010-2011

Details Cassini ISS Observations of Saturn's Great White Spot Storm 2010-2011 Cassini ISS Observations of Saturn's Great White Spot Storm 2010-2011

Oct 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011epsc.conf..657s&link_type=abstract

EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2011, held 2-7 October 2011 in Nantes, France. http://meetings.copernicus.org/epsc-dps2011, p.657

Physics

Scientific paper

We present Cassini ISS observations of a giant cumulus storm on Saturn that started raging in early December of 2010 at 33°N latitude. Since then, the storm has evolved to become one of the fastest-evolving and largest-scale cumulus disturbances observed to date in our Solar System, and substantially altered the northern hemisphere cloud morphology. We believe that the new storm is the latest occurrence of the recurring Great White Spot storms on Saturn, which has an apparent 30-year quasi-periodicity and last erupted in 1990. Our measurements indicate that the new storm drifts westward at a rate of 2.8° in System III longitude per Julian day. Our observations also reveal that the storm erupted out of a cloud feature called the String of Pearls (SoPs), which was first discovered by Cassini VIMS instrument in 2004, and revealed to be a chain of cyclonic vortices by Muro et al (1). We have monitored the SoPs motions and showed that it has drifted westward at a constant rate of 2.28° in longitude per Julian day over a three-year period with less than 1-percent variation in its propagation rate. The drift rates of the new storm and the SoPs are substantially different from the local zonal wind speed; we propose that these drift rates reflect motions deep within Saturn's molecular hydrogen envelope.

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