Nightside Winds at the Lower Clouds of Venus with Akatsuki/IR2: Longitudinal, local time and decadal variations from comparison with previous measurements

TL;DR

This study measures and analyzes the wind speeds at Venus's nightside lower clouds over several years, revealing significant variability and long-term changes using data from Akatsuki, ground-based telescopes, and previous missions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of long-term and short-term wind variations at Venus's lower clouds using new and historical data, with improved measurement techniques.

Findings

Wind speeds vary up to 30 m/s over decades.

Zonal and meridional wind profiles are consistent with past missions.

Evidence of solar tide or wave influence on wind variability.

Abstract

We present measurements of the wind speeds at the nightside lower clouds of Venus from observations by JAXA's mission Akatsuki during 2016, complemented with new wind measurements from ground-based observations acquired with TNG/NICS in 2012 and IRTF/SpeX in 2015 and 2017. Zonal and meridional components of the winds were measured from cloud tracking on a total of 466 Akatsuki images of Venus acquired by the camera IR2 using the 2.26-$\mathrm{\mu m}$ filter, with spatial resolutions ranging 10--80 km per pixel and covering from 2016 March 22 to October 31. More than 149,000 wind vectors were obtained with an automatic technique of template matching, and 2,947 wind vectors were inferred with the manual procedure. The meridional profiles for both components of the winds are found to be consistent with results from the Venus Express mission during 2006--2008, although stronger wind variability is found for the zonal component at equatorial latitudes where Akatsuki observations have better viewing geometry than Venus Express. The zonal winds at low latitudes also suggest a zonal variability that could be associated with solar tides or vertically propagating orographic waves. Finally, the combination of our wind measurements from TNG/NICS, IRTF/SpeX and Akatsuki images with previously published and based in data from 1978 to 2017 suggests variations of up to 30 m s$^{-1}$ in the winds at the lower clouds of the Venus nightside.