Temporal Evolution of Saturn's Great White Spot Storm 2010-2011

Details Temporal Evolution of Saturn's Great White Spot Storm 2010-2011 Temporal Evolution of Saturn's Great White Spot Storm 2010-2011

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufm.p11h..07s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #P11H-07

Physics

[5464] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Remote Sensing, [5704] Planetary Sciences: Fluid Planets / Atmospheres, [5739] Planetary Sciences: Fluid Planets / Meteorology, [6275] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Saturn

Scientific paper

We report on the temporal evolution of a large cumulus storm that erupted on Saturn in early December of 2010. The new event marks the latest occurrence of the 30-year quasi-periodic giant storms on Saturn known as the Great White Spots (GWS), which last erupted in 1990. Cassini ISS camera first captured the storm on December 5th, 2010, and has since monitored the storm at a semi-regular interval. The current storm erupted at 33 degree N planetocentric latitude, and our measurements indicate that the storm's initial longitude coincided that of a feature called the String of Pearls (SoPs) first found using Cassini VIMS (Momary et al. 2006 DPS/AAS, Choi et al. 2009 Icarus 10.1029/2008JE003254), suggesting that the new GWS and SoPs may be causally related. Our ISS images between December 2010 and June 2011 show that the storm had a very bright leading edge, which drifted westward relative to the Voyager longitude system at 2.79 degree per Earth day, similar to that measured by Sanchez-Lavega et al (2011, Nature 10.1038/nature10203). Our new methane filter images (MT2 and MT3) show that a substantial amount of cloud material is lifted at the leading edge up to the stratosphere, which indicates highly energetic cumulus convective activities consistent with Fischer et al (2011, Nature 10.1038/nature10205)'s detection of lightning discharges in the radio frequencies. Our images also reveal vertical shear in the local wind fields around the storm. During the early phase of the storm a large dark oval formed near the leading edge of the storm and drifted westward at 0.85 degree per day on average between December 2010 and June 2011, which was also noted in CIRS observation (Fletcher et al. 2011, Science 10.1126/science.1204774). Our measurements show that the oval has an anticyclonic vorticity. The anticyclonic oval defined the eastern end of the storm activities. By late June 2011, the storm's leading edge collided with the anticyclonic oval after encircling the entire latitudinal band. After impacting the oval, the cumulus activities in the storm decreased, and the bright clouds that used to characterize leading edge are no longer present. We also compare the wind field before and after the storm, and examine the effects of the latest storm in the context of Saturn's global meteorology.

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