FIRST MARS -- Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming -- and now Jupiter: Jupiter's raging thunderstorms a sign of 'global upheaval'
The new observations are the first to show the clouds in the process of forming and punching through the cloud deck, revealing them in unprecedented detail."Warm hydrogen gas?" What on Earth could be causing that? Must be the Iinternal heat. Jovians are such losers what with all those hydrogen-guzzling up-armored SUVs! Posted by Vanderleun at January 23, 2008 12:07 PM | TrackBackThe two big storms appear to be the result of plumes of warm hydrogen gas rising from at least a few dozen kilometres below the cloud deck, according to the authors' simulations. The plumes rose more than 120 kilometres, punching through the normal cloud deck to tower 30 kilometres above it. The storms appeared during a dramatic, planet-wide disturbance on Jupiter that is ongoing. The cause of the disturbance has yet to be explained, but it has changed the colour of some of the planet's stripes.
"It's pretty clear that there's a lot going on in Jupiter's atmosphere right now - much more than usual - and these storms are probably tied in with that so-called global upheaval," says co-author Imke de Pater of the University of California in Berkeley, US.
The appearance of the two storms provides information on the atmosphere below the cloud deck, de Pater says. In order to successfully reproduce the appearance of the storms in simulations, the researchers had to set the amount of water vapour below the clouds to very high levels - about 300 times that measured by the Galileo spacecraft, which sent an entry probe into an unusually cloud-free region on Jupiter in 1995.
The higher amount of water vapour agrees better with other studies of Jupiter's chemical composition, which suggest the planet is enriched in elements heavier than hydrogen compared to the Sun.
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