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So when we look at Jupiter, we see a lot of
structure that looks very similar to the Earth.
We can see storms, we see cyclones, we see anticyclones,
and these sort of storms and weather systems that we see on
Earth are very similar and are happening on Jupiter.
Fluid mechanics is hopefully the same everywhere in the universe,
but Jupiter and Earth are very different.
Jupiter is much bigger, it rotates a lot faster, they're
made of different material, and Jupiter is much further away
from the sun than the Earth is.
The quasi-biennial oscillation, or the QBO, on Earth is an
equatorial phenomenon in the stratosphere where the winds are
changing direction approximately every two years.
Depending on which phase the QBO is in, eastward or westward, the
temperature signal corresponds to that, so it's warmer in the
eastward phase and cooler in the westward phase.
It's been shown that it can actually be a barrier to
transport of aerosols across the equator, and has been linked to
the frequency and the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic
and the Pacific Ocean.
The long-term scales on Earth's climate is something that we're
very interested in, and how that applies to other planets'
atmospheres is really why we're studying Earth and Jupiter.
The quasi-quadrennial oscillation in Jupiter's
stratosphere is a temperature signal that we see in the
equator, where we see the temperature get warmer and
cooler approximately every four Earth years.
We used a general circulation model, where we focused on
simulating the effects of small-scale waves produced from
convection in Jupiter's equatorial region to simulate
the QQO.
The waves propagate upwards from the clouds and force the winds
in the stratosphere to change direction, going from eastward
to westward approximately every four years.
Our model was able to reproduce the behavior of the QQO, but was
also able to reproduce temperatures from the
observations, and both of those together give us a lot of
confidence that our model is very accurate in what's driving
the QQO.
The outer planets serve as a laboratory for understanding
atmospheric physics under very different conditions than are
present on the Earth.
Understanding how their atmospheres change and evolve
and their climates can give us insight
into any planetary atmosphere.
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