Convection in Planets With Oblate Geometry

Current simulations of the giant planets assume a spherical geometry, however centrifugal forces on these rapidly rotating gaseous bodies result in non-spherical geometries. Saturn, for example, is visibly non- spherical, with an ellipticity, or flattening of 10%, where the flattening is the ratio of the equatorial-polar length difference to the equatorial length. While the ellipticity of a giant planet is likely a function of the semi- major axis, as the density and the distortion caused by rotation vary with depth in the planet, these initial simulations assume a constant ellipticity with semi-major axis for simplicity. Simulations with varying ellipticity are compared at multiple Rayleigh numbers to see how the convective patterns change as the gravitational field becomes increasingly non-radial. The number of density scale heights is also varied to ascertain the influence of density stratification on the convective patterns.