Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufmae13a0322s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #AE13A-0322
Other
3304 Atmospheric Electricity, 3311 Clouds And Aerosols, 3324 Lightning, 6220 Jupiter
Scientific paper
Recent observational and theoretical studies suggest that thunderstorms, i.e., strong moist convective clouds in Jupiter"'s atmosphere are very important not only as an essential ingredient of meteorology of Jupiter but also as a potentially very useful "probe" of the water abundance of the deep atmosphere. Sugiyama et al. (2008) have been numerically investigating possible clouds structure of Jupiter by using moist convection model that can represent convective motion and associated cloud formation explicitly. One of the most important findings is the existence of quasi-periodic temporal variation of the convective clouds activity. The period of the "active/break" cycle is roughly proportional to the amount of condensable component in the sub-cloud layer. It should also be remarked that the clouds structure given by the numerical simulation is different from the classical three clouds layers structure that has been expected by the previous studies employing one-dimensional thermodynamic equilibrium model. The results suggest that all three components clouds are not always exist and the depth of clouds base varie over a wide range. Lightning activity represents the active moist convective area more directly than the optically observed clouds do. We are suggesting lightning observation in the JJSDT mission that is a future mission to Jupiter System. One of the promising direction of improvement is to enhance time resolution, i.e., high-speed imaging. All of past observations were conducted as long time exposure imaging, which could only estimate broad measure of total optical energy of lightning escaping from the clouds, which is not necessarily propotinal to the lightning energy due to the cloud depth effect for extinction; it could not give much information on the intensity of individual flashes nor the total activity of lightning. The another important direction is to observe lightening with two or more narrowband filters with different bandwidth; the ratio of observed intensities reflects the pressure broadening. This results in the estimate of the depth of flashes which is essential to calculate the actual energy dissipation by lightning discharge.
Nakajima Kaoru
Sato Masahide
Sugiyama Katsuyuki
Takahashi Yoshiyuki
Takeuchi Sachiko
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