In The Slow Winds of Saturn: Thunderstorms, the String of Pearls, and the Mid- Latitude Annular Cloud

Details In The Slow Winds of Saturn: Thunderstorms, the String of Pearls, and the Mid- Latitude Annular Cloud In The Slow Winds of Saturn: Thunderstorms, the String of Pearls, and the Mid- Latitude Annular Cloud

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008epsc.conf..637b&link_type=abstract

European Planetary Science Congress 2008, Proceedings of the conference held 21-25 September, 2008 in Münster, Germany. Online a

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Using Saturn's 5-μm thermal glow, Saturn's dynamic atmosphere near the 2-3-bar level has been investigated for nearly four years by Cassini- Huygens/VIMS. A wide variety of cloud structures - comprised, putatively, of ammonia hydrosulfide clouds, but perhaps with an admixture of water clouds - has been observed and characterized, including dozens of axisymmetric zonal features, planetary waves, a classic vortex structure at the south pole and a hexagonal slow-speed wave feature centered on the north pole. Numerous long-lived (> 2-years) discrete cloud structures have been observed in the northern hemisphere, many of which are unique among the planets. These include a mid-latitude annular cloud near 49 degrees north latitude (planetocentric, pc) and a "string of pearls" of some two-dozen similarly sized (~ 1500 km diameter) cloud-clearings nearly uniformly spaced across 100 degrees of longitude near 33.5 degrees latitude (pc). These latter two rather bizarre cloud systems are located among the slowest prograde wind streams on Saturn, actually moving retrograde in the Voyager rotational frame. In the southern hemisphere, the fastest (slowest) retrograde (prograde) jet correlates with the only thunderstormassociated clouds observed thus far on Saturn. VIMS daytime spectral observations indicate that these clouds observed near the 0.5-bar level are comprised of a variety of materials, including the first spectrallyidentified ammonia clouds on Saturn, presumably formed by ammonia-laden air propelled upward by thunderstorm-related convection originating > 50 km below. Thus both vertically-extensive (thunderstorms) and long-lived, coherent cloud features (the mid-latitude annular ring and string of pearls) correlate well with retrograde motions, perhaps indicating unusually low vertical shears there which preserve coherency and allow convective flows to ri

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