Scientists used data from generations of NASA missions, such as the Voyager and Cassini, to determine how to predict the weather patterns on Jupiter. The longest study ever tracked the temperatures on the planet's upper troposphere where the gas giant's weather occurs and where it's signature colorful striped clouds form.
The study, titled "Unexpected Long-term Variability in Jupiter's Tropospheric Temperatures" published in the journal Nature Astronomy, spanned four decades and included data from NASA spacecraft and ground-based telescope observations.
Fluctuating Temperatures in Jupiter's Atmosphere
Since NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 missions in the 1970s, scientists have known that cooler temperatures are connected with Jupiter's brighter and whiter bands (known as zones), while warmer temperatures are related to Jupiter's deeper brown-red bands (known as belts).
However, there were insufficient data sets to determine how temperatures fluctuate over time. NASA reported that the team analyzed photographs of the intense infrared light that rises from warmer portions of the atmosphere to measure Jupiter's temperatures above the colorful clouds. The images were taken at regular intervals during Jupiter's three circuits around the Sun, each of which lasts 12 Earth years.
They discovered that Jupiter's temperatures rise and fall at regular intervals that are unrelated to the seasons or any other known cycles. Scientists did not anticipate seeing temperatures on Jupiter shifting in such regular cycles since the planet has mild seasons due to its tilted axis at about 3 degrees, compared to Earth's 23.5 degrees.
Moreover, the study revealed a bizarre link between the shifting temperatures that are miles apart. At specific latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the temperature went up but temperatures went down at the same latitudes in the southern hemisphere. Scientists noticed that it was like a mirror image across the equator.
Study lead researcher Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that it is similar to the phenomenon observed on Earth, wherein weather and climate patterns of one region could influence weather elsewhere.
The next step is to find out what causes these strange, synchronized fluctuations. One possible reason is apparent at the equator in which temperature variations higher up seemed to rise and fall in a pattern opposite to the troposphere, which implies that both influence each other.
Generations of NASA Observations
Orton and his colleagues started studying Jupiter in 1978 when they would write proposals to use the three large telescopes for their research, SciTech Daily reported. In the first two decades of the study, they took turns traveling to these observatories to gather information on Jupiter's temperature and then connect the dots.
The hardest part is combining years' worth of observations from different telescopes and scientific instruments to search for themes or patterns. Several undergraduate interns who were not been born yet when the study began joined Orton and his team.
The hope is that their findings would help them in predicting weather patterns on Jupiter now that they have gained a detailed insight into it. The study could be used as a basis for climate modeling along with computer simulations of the cyclical temperatures and weather for all planets across the Solar System, not just Jupiter.
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