Dynamics Of Saturn'S Mid-scale Storms In The Cassini Era.

Details Dynamics Of Saturn'S Mid-scale Storms In The Cassini Era. Dynamics Of Saturn'S Mid-scale Storms In The Cassini Era.

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.1116d&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #11.16; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1020

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Convective storms, similar to those in Earth, but of much larger scale, develop often in Saturn's atmosphere. During the Voyagers’ flybys of Saturn in 1981 mid-scale storms, with an horizontal extension of the order of 1000-3000 km were observed to occur mainly in a narrow tropical-latitude band in the Northern hemisphere at latitudes 38-40 deg North. Contrasting with the Voyagers’ era, since the starting of the Cassini mission in 2004, a similar mid-scale convective activity has concentrated in the so-called "storm alley", a narrow band at a symmetric Southern latitude of 38 deg.. In this work, we characterize this storm activity using available visual information provided by Cassini ISS cameras and the continuous survey from the Earth by the International Outer Planets Watch (IOPW) and its online database PVOL (Hueso et al., Planetary and Space Science, 2010). We study the frequency of appearance of storms with sizes above 2000 km, their characteristic size and life-time, as well as their interaction with surrounding dynamical features. In particular we examine the possibility that storms might provide a mechanism of injection of energy into Saturn's jets, the influence of storms in the generation of atmospheric vortices, and the analogies and differences of Voyagers’ and present day jet structure at the relevant latitudes.
Acknowledgments: This work has been funded by the Spanish MICIIN AYA2009-10701 with FEDER support and Grupos Gobierno Vasco IT-464

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