Cassini/cirs Observations Of Saturn At 7.18 Microns

Details Cassini/cirs Observations Of Saturn At 7.18 Microns Cassini/cirs Observations Of Saturn At 7.18 Microns

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.3708i&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #37.08; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.488

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We analyze the thermal infrared spectra of Saturn obtained by the Cassini-CIRS instrument to infer thermal and cloud information for Saturn's stratosphere and upper troposphere. A narrow spectral window centered at 1392 cm-1 allows us to probe the structure of Saturn's atmosphere in the vicinity of the 1 bar pressure level. Variations in the planet's emission at 1392 cm-1 indicate the presence of an atmospheric absorber that is not uniformly distributed over the planet.
At the 1392 cm-1 the planet does not exhibit the traditional well defined zone-belt structure. Instead, in the southern hemisphere we observe a relatively gradual change in the zonal mean brightness temperature with a minimum at 25S and a maximum in the south polar region. The observed variation corresponds to a zonal mean brightness temperature change of more than 10 K. For comparision, the zone-belt mean temperature contrast at the 1392 cm-1 is less than 3 K. In addition, the relatively cold region between 20S-55S shows 1-2 K brightness temperature variations at small zonal numbers.
The region south of 65S shows a higher than expected brightness temperature indicating that in the polar region the emission is likely to originate from a haze layer in the warm upper stratosphere (pressure less than 10 mbar) rather than from the 1bar pressure level where clouds are expected to form.
We use a numerical inversion to constrain the absorption coefficient, the optical thickness and the pressure level of the present cloud/haze layers in Saturn's southern hemisphere and present the results for selected latitudes.

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