Scientists have completed the longest-ever study tracking temperatures in Jupiter's upper troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere where the giant planet's weather occurs and where its signature colorful striped clouds form. The work, conducted over four decades by stitching together data from NASA spacecraft and ground-based telescope observations,
found unexpected patterns in how temperatures of Jupiter's belts and zones change over time. The study is a major step toward a better understanding of what drives weather at our solar system's largest planet and eventually being able to forecast it.
© ESO / L.N. Fletcher, NAOJ
Figure 1: (Left) Color composite images of Jupiter in the wavelengths of 8.6 and 10.7 microns, obtained by the VLT in February, and March 2016, respectively. The colors represent the temperatures and cloudiness: The darker areas are cold and cloudy, and the brighter areas are warmer and cloud-free. (Right) Jupiter at a wavelength of 18 microns obtained in May 2019 with COMICS on the Subaru Telescope.
's troposphere has a lot in common with Earth's: It's where clouds form and storms churn. To understand this weather activity, scientists need to study certain properties, including wind, pressure, humidity, and temperature. They have known since NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 missions in the 1970s that, in general, colder temperatures are associated with Jupiter's lighter and whiter bands (known as zones), while the darker brown-red bands (known as belts) are locations of warmer temperatures.
But there weren't enough data sets to understand how temperatures vary over the long-term. An international research team of planetary scientists from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA, University of Leicester (UK), and other institutes broke new ground by studying images of the bright infrared glow (invisible to the human eye) that rises from warmer regions of the atmosphere (upper troposphere), directly measuring Jupiter's temperatures above the colorful clouds. The scientists collected these images at regular intervals over three of Jupiter's orbits around the Sun, each of which lasts 12 Earth years.
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