Data for: Turbulence Power Spectra in Regions Surrounding Jupiter's South Polar Cyclones from Juno/JIRAM
2020
We present a power spectral analysis of two narrow annular regions near Jupiter’s South Pole derived from data acquired by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument onboard NASA’s Juno mission. In particular, our analysis focuses on the dataset acquired by the JIRAM M‐band imager (hereafter IMG‐M) that probes Jupiter’s thermal emission in a spectral window centered at 4.8 μm. We analyze the power spectral densities of circular paths outside and inside of cyclones on images acquired during six Juno perijoves (PJ). The typical spatial resolution is around 55 km pixel⁻¹. We limited our analysis to six acquisitions of the South Pole from February 2017 to May 2018. The power spectral densities both outside and inside the circumpolar ring seem to follow two different power laws. The wavenumbers follow average power laws of ‐0.9±0.2 (inside) and ‐1.2±0.2 (outside), and of ‐3.2±0.3 (inside) and ‐3.4±0.2 (outside), respectively beneath and above the transition in slope located at ~ 2.×10⁻³ km⁻¹ wavenumber. This kind of spectral behavior is typical of two‐dimensional turbulence. We interpret the 500 km length scale, corresponding to the transition in slope, as the Rossby deformation radius. It is compatible with the dimensions of a subset of eddy features visible in the regions analyzed, suggesting that a baroclinic instability may exist. If so, it means that the quasi‐geostrophic approximation is valid in this context.
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