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Wednesday, June 06, 2007
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Seminar

Rotating convective turbulence: Modeling zonal flows in the molecular envelopes of the Giant Planets

Jonathan Aurnou
University of California at Los Angeles

I will present a set of numerical models of rotating convection in spherical shell geometries. At low convective Rossby number, we find that multiple jets form in geometrically thin shells with radius ratio values close to 0.90. These jets follow topographic Rhines scaling and are similar to zonal flows observed on Jupiter and Saturn. In contrast, at convective Rossby numbers of order unity, strong, large-scale zonal flows develop due to angular momentum homogenization (e.g., PV mixing). These flows are similar to those observed on Uranus and Neptune. These modeling results suggest that the large-scale flows on the Giant Planets may be due to convection processes in their deep molecular envelopes.

Host: Philippe Odier, CNLS