New Observations and Simulations of Jupiter's Great, Little and Oval Red Spots and Stagnation Points and Their Interactions
Abstract
During the last year the Great Red Spot (GRS) encountered and strongly interacted with both the Red Oval (RO) and with a Little Red Spot (LRS). We present simulations of jovian vortex interactions for the cases in which the interacting jovian vortices merge (e.g., the GRS and LRS), slide past each other (e.g., the GRS and RO), or repel each other (e.g. the three White Ovals between their formation in the 1930's and the mid 1990's when they bunched up and eventually merged to form the RO). Using HST observations and the velocity fields extracted from them, we demonstrate the important role that the jovian jet streams play in these vortex interactions. We also show the role that the ambient jet streams and stagnation points have in determining the sizes and shapes of the equilibrium jovian vortices. We illustrate jovian stagnation points in our HST images and extracted velocity fields and show their importance in the dynamics of the vortices and in South Tropical Disturbances.
We gratefully acknowledge support from HST, NSF-AST, NASA-PATM and NSF Teragrid Computing- Publication:
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AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #40
- Pub Date:
- September 2008
- Bibcode:
- 2008DPS....40.5303M