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  • My name is Amy Simon-Miller, and I study the atmospheres of the Jovian planets.

  • Weather on Jupiter is confined to a rather thin layer, kind of high up in the atmosphere, so the tops of the clouds are what we're seeing when we look at Jupiter.

  • One thing we're seeing in the southern part of the equatorial region, is little V-shaped clouds, or chevrons, and we wanted to understand how those are moving in the atmosphere.

  • What we think chevrons are are simply holes in the clouds. They are simply areas where we don't see any bright white clouds.

  • The Cassini mission flew by Jupiter in the year 2000, and because it was a slow distant flyby, we got a lot of coverage of the planet over a long time period.

  • So we were able to put those images together and make movies.

  • What we found by looking at the movies is that they're not just moving from east to west, they're moving up and down, tracing out what's called a Rossby wave.

  • We have these on Earth as well. In particular we see them around the poles, there are circumpolar jets, and we can also see them in the jet streams at mid-latitudes.

  • Jet streams on Earth typically flow from west to east, but sometimes you can see them meandering from north to south, and that's a signature of Rossby waves here on Earth.

  • These meanders can sometimes grow stronger, and that can lead to everyday weather changes, such as the passage of fronts, or storms being generated.

  • For most people, what we really want to understand is weather on Earth, and what are the things that affect weather on Earth?

  • Now, Jupiter and Earth are very different planets: we don't have land and we don't have seasons on Jupiter.

  • On the other hand, we see very similar weather phenomena.

  • So being able to understand and study another planet teaches a lot more about what's common in an atmosphere on the Earth.

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