Jovian Vortex Hunter

Jupiter’s atmosphere is much like ours: there are clouds of different shapes and sizes. On Jupiter, most of the clouds are made of chemicals other than water, and can be several thousand kilometers in size. Some clouds are also created from powerful storms that are over 50 kilometers/30 miles in height and hundreds of kilometers across. Figuring out how these clouds form is very important for understanding Jupiter’s atmosphere, and the processes create the amazing features that we see.

Here, we are mainly interested in vortices, which are clouds that forms in features that have a round/elliptical shape, like hurricanes. We are interested in the physics behind why they come in different shapes and sizes. Anti-cylones (have a “negative vorticity” and rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere) and cyclones (spin anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern) have very different colors and shapes.