Fluctuations in Jupiter's equatorial stratospheric oscillation

The equatorial stratospheres of Earth, Jupiter and Saturn all exhibit a remarkable periodic oscillation of their temperatures and winds with height. Earth’s quasi-biennial oscillation and Saturn’s quasi-periodic equatorial oscillation have recently been observed to experience disruptions in their vertical structure as a consequence of atmospheric events occurring far from the equator. Here we reveal that Jupiter’s quasi-quadrennial oscillation can also be perturbed by strong tropospheric activity at equatorial and off-equatorial latitudes. Observations of Jupiter’s stratospheric temperatures between 1980 and 2011 show two significantly different periods for the quasi-quadrennial oscillation, with a 5.7-yr period between 1980 and 1990 and a 3.9-yr period between 1996 and 2006. Major disruptions to the predicted quasi-quadrennial oscillation pattern in 1992 and 2007 coincided with marked planetary-scale disturbances in the equatorial and low-latitude troposphere, suggesting that they are connected to vertically propagating waves generated by meteorological sources in the deeper troposphere (that is 500–4,000-mbar pressures). Disruptions in Jupiter’s periodic oscillations are thus inherently different from those of Saturn or the Earth. This interconnectivity between the troposphere and stratosphere, which is probably common to all planetary atmospheres, shows that seemingly regular cycles of variability can switch between different modes when subjected to extreme meteorological events

The Effects of Waves on the Meridional Thermal Structure of Jupiter’s Stratosphere

The American Astronomical Society, find out more The Institute of Physics, find out moreTHE FOLLOWING ARTICLE ISOPEN ACCESSThe Effects of Waves on the Meridional Thermal Structure of Jupiter's StratosphereRichard G. Cosentino1, Thomas Greathouse2, Amy Simon3, Rohini Giles2, Raúl Morales-Juberías4, Leigh N. Fletcher5 and Glenn Orton6Published 2020 November 10 • © 2020. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.The Planetary Science Journal, Volume 1, Number 3DownloadArticle PDF DownloadArticle ePubFiguresTablesReferencesDownload PDFDownload ePub318 Total downloadsTurn on MathJaxShare this articleShare this content via emailShare on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on Google+Share on MendeleyHide article informationAuthor affiliations1 Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA2 Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX 78238, USA3 Solar System Exploration Div., NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA4 Physics Department, New Mexico Institute of Technology, Socorro, NM 87801, USA5 School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK6 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USAORCID iDsRichard G. Cosentino https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3047-615XThomas Greathouse https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6613-5731Amy Simon https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4641-6186Rohini Giles https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7665-6562Leigh N. Fletcher https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5834-9588Glenn Orton https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7871-2823DatesReceived 2020 June 16Accepted 2020 September 30Published 2020 November 10Check for updates using CrossmarkCitationRichard G. Cosentino et al 2020 Planet. Sci. J. 1 63Create citation alertDOIhttps://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/abbda3KeywordsJupiter ; Stratosphere ; Infrared observatories Journal RSS feed Sign up for new issue notificationsAbstractA thermal oscillation in Jupiter's equatorial stratosphere, thought to have ~4 Earth year period, was first discovered in 7.8 μm imaging observations from the 1980s and 1990s. Such imaging observations were sensitive to the 10–20 hPa pressure region in the atmosphere. More recent 7.8 μm long-slit high-spectroscopic observations from 2012 to 2017 taken using the Texas Echelon cross-dispersed Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES), mounted on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), have vertically resolved this phenomenon's structure, and show that it spans a range of pressure from 2 to 20 hPa. The TEXES instrument was mounted on the Gemini North telescope in March 2017, improving the diffraction-limited spatial resolution by a factor of ~2.5 compared with that offered by the IRTF. This Gemini spatial scale sensitivity study was performed in support of the longer-termed Jupiter monitoring being performed at the IRTF. We find that the spatial resolution afforded by the smaller 3 m IRTF is sufficient to spatially resolve the 3D structure of Jupiter's equatorial stratospheric oscillation by comparing the thermal retrievals of IRTF and Gemini observations. We then performed numerical simulations in a general circulation model to investigate how the structure of Jupiter's stratosphere responds to changes in the latitudinal extent of wave forcing in the troposphere. We find our simulations produce a lower limit in meridional wave forcing of ±7° (planetocentric coordinates) centered about the equator. This likely remains constant over time to produce off-equatorial thermal oscillations at ±13°, consistent with observations spanning nearly four decades.</div