Ramanakumar Sankar, Shawn Brueshaber, Lucy Fortson, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, Chris Lintott, Kameswara Mantha, Cooper Nesmith and Glenn S. Orton
{"title":"Jovian Vortex Hunter: A Citizen Science Project to Study Jupiter’s Vortices","authors":"Ramanakumar Sankar, Shawn Brueshaber, Lucy Fortson, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, Chris Lintott, Kameswara Mantha, Cooper Nesmith and Glenn S. Orton","doi":"10.3847/psj/ad6e75","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The Jovian atmosphere contains a wide diversity of vortices, which have a large range of sizes, colors, and forms in different dynamical regimes. The formation processes for these vortices are poorly understood, and aside from a few known, long-lived ovals, such as the Great Red Spot and Oval BA, vortex stability and their temporal evolution are currently largely unknown. In this study, we use JunoCam data and a citizen science project on Zooniverse to derive a catalog of vortices, some with repeated observations, from 2018 May to 2021 September, and we analyze their associated properties, such as size, location, and color. We find that different-colored vortices (binned as white, red, brown, and dark) follow vastly different distributions in terms of their sizes and where they are found on the planet. We employ a simplified stability criterion using these vortices as a proxy, to derive a minimum Rossby deformation length for the planet of ∼1800 km. We find that this value of Ld is largely constant throughout the atmosphere and does not have an appreciable meridional gradient.","PeriodicalId":34524,"journal":{"name":"The Planetary Science Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Planetary Science Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3847/psj/ad6e75","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The Jovian atmosphere contains a wide diversity of vortices, which have a large range of sizes, colors, and forms in different dynamical regimes. The formation processes for these vortices are poorly understood, and aside from a few known, long-lived ovals, such as the Great Red Spot and Oval BA, vortex stability and their temporal evolution are currently largely unknown. In this study, we use JunoCam data and a citizen science project on Zooniverse to derive a catalog of vortices, some with repeated observations, from 2018 May to 2021 September, and we analyze their associated properties, such as size, location, and color. We find that different-colored vortices (binned as white, red, brown, and dark) follow vastly different distributions in terms of their sizes and where they are found on the planet. We employ a simplified stability criterion using these vortices as a proxy, to derive a minimum Rossby deformation length for the planet of ∼1800 km. We find that this value of Ld is largely constant throughout the atmosphere and does not have an appreciable meridional gradient.