Icing on The Brownie

“So what you’re saying, Sy, is that Jupiter’s white stripes are ammonia snow clouds that go way up above a lower layer of brown clouds like the white icing stripes I put on my brownies.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Al.”

“But why stripes? We got white clouds here on Earth and sometimes they’re in layers but they don’t make stripes.”

“Well, actually they do, but you need the long-term picture to see it. Ever notice that Earth’s forests and deserts make stripes?”

“How ’bout that? I guess they do, sorta. How’s that work?”

“It took us five hundred years to figure out the details. Quick summary. Sunlight does its best year-round heating job at the Equator, where the oceans humidify the air. Warm air rises. Rising warm air cools, releases its moisture as rain, and you get a rainforest belt. The cooled, dried air spreads out until it sinks at about the 30th parallels north and south. Dry air sucks moisture out of the land as it returns to the Equator and you get desert belts. Repeat the cycle. More loops like that center around both 60th parallels. The pattern’s not completely uniform because of things like mountain ranges that block some of the flows. Basically, though, as the years accumulate you get stripes.”

“Jupiter does that, too, huh?”

“On steroids. In one way it’s simpler — no underlying continents mess things up. On the other hand, Jupiter’s got more than a hundred times Earth’s surface area so there’s room for more loops. Also, Jupiter’s interior is still shedding a lot of heat, almost as much as the planet gets from the Sun. Here’s a diagram on Old Reliable.”

“So you’re saying that the upward loops push Jupiter’s atmosphere to where it’s colder and those white ammonia snow clouds form. Then the downward loops move the clouds to where it’s warmer and the ammonia evaporates to show us the brown stuff. Makes sense. But what’re those side-to-side arrows about? We got anything like those on Earth?”

“Sort of, a little bit. Remember the Coriolis force?”

“Uhh, that’s what makes hurricanes go round and round, right? Something to do with the Equator running faster than places further north or south?”

“That’s the start of it. The Earth as a whole rotates 360° eastward in 24 hours, but how many miles per hour that is depends on where you are. The Equator’s about 25000 miles long so Quito, Ecuador on the Equator does a bit more than 1000 miles per hour. Forty-five degrees away, the 45th parallels are only 70% as long as that, so Salem, Oregon and Queenstown, New Zealand circle 70% slower in miles per hour. Suppose a balloon from Salem travels south as seen from space. As seen from the Equator, the balloon appears in the northeast rather than straight north. Winds work the way that balloon would. All around the world, winds between 10° and 30° north and south come from an east-ish direction most of the time.”

“What about the winds right at the Equator? You’d think the northerly part and the southerly part would cancel each other out.”

“That’s exactly what happens, Al. We’ve got a more-or-less equatorial belt of thunderstorms from humid air cooling off as it goes straight up, but not much of a prevailing wind in any direction — that’s why the old sea captains called the region ‘the doldrums’.”

“An equator belt like Jupiter’s, eh?”

“Not quite. Jupiter has a lovely white equatorial zone all right, but that one doesn’t stand still. It roars eastward, 300 miles per hour faster than the equator’s own 28000 miles per hour. All Jupiter’s white zones move east at a pretty good clip. Its dark belts sprint westward at their own hundred-mile pace. Then there’s the jet streams that run between neighboring bands, and lots of big and little vortices carried along for the ride. The planet’s way too segmented and violent for Coriolis forces to build up enough to play a part. The scientists have a couple of heavily-simplified models, but nowhere near enough data or computer time to fill them in.”

“Earth’s atmosphere is messy enough, thanks. My brain’s hurting.”

Voyager I video of Jupiter, processed by JPL,
from Wikimedia Commons

~~ Rich Olcott


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