3. Cloud-Resolving Simulation in Gas Giant and Ice Giant Atmospheres

  Moist convection is likely the key to understanding the first-order behavior of gas giant and giant ice atmospheres, including jet formation and belt-and-zone transport of observationally significant vapor and tracers. Here, I use our non-hydrostatic atmosphere model to study the vertical structure of temperature, vapor distribution, and buoyancy.

  Recent and past observations on solar system and extra-solar planets raise questions about the jet formation and tracer distribution in their atmospheres. To shed the light on these phenomena, we developed a Vertically-Implicit-Correction (VIC) scheme for a cloud resolving model, Simulating Nonhydrostatic Planetary Atmospheres (SNAP), to simulate the atmospheric dynamics in the global scale. The VIC scheme can improve the computational efficiency by up to 2-to-3 orders of magnitude depends on the spatial resolution. We validated our new VIC scheme by a hierarchy of benchmark tests ranging from localized bubble tests to global simulations, such as Held-Suarez test. The simulation results of the VIC scheme show the consistent results with previous ones. 

[doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab9ec7]

1. Rotational Light Curves of Jupiter

  We investigated multi-wavelength rotational light curves (emission and reflection curves) of Jupiter for the first time. Our result shows that the disk averaged emission at 5 Micron has a ~20% percent variation, which is consistent with the previous research. On the other hand, the rotational light curves of the other wavelengths only possess a few percent variations. We suggest that the large variation at 5 Micron is caused by the probing of cloud holes (e.g., looking into different atmosphere layers) which possess a large temperature difference compared with cloudy regions. Those cloud holes are associated with a train of Rossby waves. At the other wavelengths, the Great Red Spot, vortices, and temperature variations in the same pressure layer lead to an a-few-percent rotational variation. This research provides several insights and implications for unveiling the mechanism behind the rotational variations of cold brown dwarfs and directly imaged exoplanets.

[doi:10.3847/1538-3881/aafba7]