Geodesic Transport Barriers in Jupiter's Atmosphere: A Video-Based Analysis

Abstract

Jupiter's zonal jets and Great Red Spot are well known from still images. Yet the planet's atmosphere is highly unsteady, which suggests that the actual material transport barriers delineating its main features should be time-dependent. Rare video footages of Jupiter's clouds provide an opportunity to verify this expectation from optically reconstructed velocity fields. Available videos, however, provide short-time and temporally aperiodic velocity fields that defy classical dynamical systems analyses focused on asymptotic features. To this end, we use here the recent theory of geodesic transport barriers to uncover finite-time mixing barriers in the wind field extracted from a video captured by NASA's Cassini space mission. More broadly, the approach described here provides a systematic and frame-invariant way to extract dynamic coherent structures from time-resolved remote observations of unsteady continua.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Defining Coherent Vortices Objectively from the Vorticity
• A Critical Comparison of Lagrangian Methods for Coherent Structure Detection
• Objective Eulerian Coherent Structures
• Robust Reference Frame Extraction from Unsteady 2D Vector Fields with Convolutional Neural Networks
• Uncovering the Edge of the Polar Vortex
• Barriers to the Transport of Diffusive Scalars in Compressible Flows
• Stability of the Malvinas Current
• Level set formulation of two-dimensional Lagrangian vortex detection methods
• Transfer Operators from Optimal Transport Plans for Coherent Set Detection