The 1998 November 14 Occultation of GSC 0622-00345 by Saturn. II. Stratospheric Thermal Profile, Power Spectrum, and Gravity Waves

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a Saturn occultation to derive its stratospheric thermal profile, investigates gravity waves and turbulence effects, and introduces new significance tests for wave detection in atmospheric data.

Contribution

It provides a detailed thermal profile of Saturn's atmosphere, applies wavelet analysis to identify gravity waves, and develops new statistical tests to distinguish real signals from noise.

Findings

Thermal profile between 1 and 60 μbar shows stability and wave-like features.

Detected significant gravity wave signatures consistent with Earth's and Jupiter's spectra.

Identified turbulence effects and noise influences on wave detection.

Abstract

On 1998 November 14, Saturn and its rings occulted the star GSC 0622-00345. The occultation latitude was 55.5 degrees S. This paper analyzes the 2.3 {\mu}m light curve derived by Harrington & French. A fixed-baseline isothermal fit to the light curve has a temperature of 140 +/- 3 K, assuming a mean molecular mass of 2.35 AMU. The thermal profile obtained by numerical inversion is valid between 1 and 60 {\mu}bar. The vertical temperature gradient is >0.2 K/km more stable than the adiabatic lapse rate, but it still shows the alternating-rounded-spiked features seen in many temperature gradient profiles from other atmospheric occultations and usually attributed to breaking gravity (buoyancy) waves. We conduct a wavelet analysis of the thermal profile, and show that, even with our low level of noise, scintillation due to turbulence in Earth's atmosphere can produce large temperature swings in light-curve inversions. Spurious periodic features in the "reliable" region of a wavelet amplitude spectrum can exceed 0.3 K in our data. We also show that gravity-wave model fits to noisy isothermal light curves can lead to convincing wave "detections". We provide new significance tests for localized wavelet amplitudes, wave model fits, and global power spectra of inverted occultation light curves by assessing the effects of pre- and post-occultation noise on these parameters. Based on these tests, we detect several significant ridges and isolated peaks in wavelet amplitude, to which we fit a gravity wave model. We also strongly detect the global power spectrum of thermal fluctuations in Saturn's atmosphere, which resembles the "universal" (modified Desaubies) curve associated with saturated spectra of propagating gravity waves on Earth and Jupiter.