Baroclinic Instability as a Source for Jupiter's Zonal Jets

Details Baroclinic Instability as a Source for Jupiter's Zonal Jets Baroclinic Instability as a Source for Jupiter's Zonal Jets

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005dps....37.3032k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #37, #30.32; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 37, p.1565

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Jupiter's atmosphere is dominated by strong zonal flows. We propose that baroclinic instability plays an important role in the generation and stability of these jets. We model the atmosphere as a two layer structure, where the upper one is a standard quasi-geostrophic layer on a β plane, and the lower layer is parameterized to represent a deep interior convective columnar structure. Linear stability theory predicts that the high wave number perturbations will be the dominant unstable modes for a weak vertical wind shear as we may expect from observations. We develop a nonlinear model truncated to one growing mode which generates a multiple jet meridional structure, driven by the nonlinear interaction between the eddies. In the weakly supercritical limit this model agrees with previous weakly nonlinear theory, but it can be explored beyond this limit allowing the multiple jet induced zonal flow to be stronger than the eddy field. Then we use a fully nonlinear pseudo-spectral model which reproduces a stable meridional multi-jet structure when beginning from a random potential vorticity perturbation field. The instability removes energy from the mean state weak baroclinic shear and generates turbulent eddies that undergo an inverse energy cascade and form multi-jet zonal winds. We show that the basic physical mechanism for the generation of the jets in the full numerical model is similar to that of the truncated model.

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