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

TL;DR

This paper applies geodesic transport barrier theory to analyze Jupiter's unsteady atmosphere using short, time-dependent velocity fields from video footage, revealing finite-time mixing barriers and dynamic structures.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic, frame-invariant method to identify finite-time transport barriers in unsteady planetary atmospheres from video data.

Findings

Identified finite-time mixing barriers in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of geodesic transport barriers in unsteady flows.

Provided a new approach for analyzing dynamic coherent structures from remote observations.

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.