Research
Jupiter's jetstreams give it a banded appearance; the jetstreams lie
approximately at the intersection between the cream and beige coloured
bands.
Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Narrow fast flowing currents of fluid, known as jetstreams, circumnavigate the atmosphere of both the Earth and the gas giants. Despite lacking a solid surface, the clouds visible on a gas giant are confined to a thin “weather layer” that is dynamically similar to the atmosphere on Earth. However, on Earth the mechanisms that generate and maintain the jetstreams depend on the solid surface and the large pole-to-equator temperature gradient. Without either a solid surface or a large temperature gradient, gas giants require different mechanisms to explain their jetstream structure.
As the weather layer contains a small fraction of the mass of a gas giant, it is arguably a self consistent model to only consider the dynamics within the weather layer, prescribing the effect of the layers beneath. Such models have successfully reproduced the jetstream structure observed on gas giants. Despite their success, such models have previously lacked a physically motivated method of representing the effect of the layers below. To address this, I am developing a model that makes use of fundamental theory.
Mixing is inhibited across jetstreams and hence mixing is highly non-uniform within Jupiter's weather layer. For this reason numerically modelling Jupiter's weather layer is particularly challenging. To that end, I am investigating non-traditional numerical methods that are better tailored to accurately model jetstreams within Jupiter's atmosphere.