Strong resemblance between surface and deep zonal winds inside Jupiter revealed by high-degree gravity moments

TL;DR

This study uses high-degree gravity measurements from Juno to reconstruct Jupiter's deep zonal winds, revealing a strong resemblance to surface winds and suggesting they extend deep into the planet's interior.

Contribution

It provides the first gravity-based reconstruction of Jupiter's deep zonal winds without assuming their latitudinal profile, showing a close match with surface wind patterns.

Findings

Deep zonal winds resemble surface winds within ±35° latitude.

Reconstructed wind amplitude matches surface winds at ~2500 km depth.

Surface wind patterns extend significantly into Jupiter's interior.

Abstract

Jupiter's atmosphere-interior is a coupled fluid dynamical system strongly influenced by the rapid background rotation. While the visible atmosphere features east-west zonal winds on the order of 100 m/s (Tollefson et al. 2017), zonal flows in the dynamo region are significantly slower, on the order of 1 cm/s or less, according to the latest magnetic secular variation analysis (Bloxham et al. 2022). The vertical profile of the zonal flows and the underlying mechanism remain elusive. The latest Juno radio tracking measurements afforded the derivation of Jupiter's gravity field to spherical harmonic degree 40. Here, we use the latest gravity solution to reconstruct Jupiter's deep zonal winds without a priori assumptions about their latitudinal profile. The pattern of our reconstructed deep zonal winds strongly resembles that of the surface wind within $\pm$ 35 degrees latitude from the equator, in particular the northern off-equatorial jet (NOEJ) and the southern off-equatorial jet (SOEJ) (Kulowski et al. 2021). The reconstruction features larger uncertainties in the southern hemisphere due to the north south asymmetric nature of Juno's trajectory. Amplitude of the reconstructed deep NOEJ matches that of the surface wind when the wind is truncated at a depth around 2500 km, and becomes twice that of the surface wind if the truncation depth is reduced to about 1500 km. Our analysis supports the physical picture in which prominent part of the surface zonal winds extends into Jupiter's interior significantly deeper than the water cloud layer.