Studies of Thermal Wave Phenomena on the Jovian Planets

Ground based and Voyager observations of Jupiter have provided evidence that the tropospheric temperature shows global scale longitudinal variations which are often wavelike in character. Voyager data are reported to exhibit the presence of slowly moving thermal features, wherein the jovian tropospheric temperature patterns are not advected by the equatorial zonal winds, but are not found to rotate at the System III (interior) rate. Ground based data in a broad infrared band (8 to 13 micron) show a wavelike structure whose amplitude and spatial scale are similar to the reported properties of the slowly moving thermal features. This study is directed toward obtaining additional ground based data in infrared spectral bands whose contribution functions are optimized for specific atmospheric regions (tropospheric at 20 micron, and stratospheric at 7.8 micron), in order to confirm the previous results, and to identify the nature and physical significance of wavelike longitudinal temperature fluctuations on the Jovian planets. A 2-D infrared array detector and low resolution cryogenic grating spectrometer is being adapted to obtain maps in approx. 2/cm-1 bandpasses.