Jovian Vortex Hunter: a citizen science project to study Jupiter's vortices

TL;DR

This study uses citizen science and JunoCam data to catalog and analyze Jupiter's vortices, revealing their diverse properties and providing insights into their stability and distribution across the planet.

Contribution

Introduces a new vortex catalog derived from citizen science data and analyzes vortex properties and stability criteria on Jupiter.

Findings

Different vortex colors have distinct size and location distributions.

Estimated Rossby deformation length of ~1800 km is consistent across the atmosphere.

Vortex stability and distribution are characterized without significant meridional variation.

Abstract

The Jovian atmosphere contains a wide diversity of vortices, which have a large range of sizes, colors and forms in different dynamical regimes. The formation processes for these vortices is poorly understood, and aside from a few known, long-lived ovals, such as the Great Red Spot, and Oval BA, vortex stability and their temporal evolution are currently largely unknown. In this study, we use JunoCam data and a citizen-science project on Zooniverse to derive a catalog of vortices, some with repeated observations, through May 2018 to Sep 2021, and analyze their associated properties, such as size, location and color. We find that different colored vortices (binned as white, red, brown and dark), follow vastly different distributions in terms of their sizes and where they are found on the planet. We employ a simplified stability criterion using these vortices as a proxy, to derive a minimum Rossby deformation length for the planet of $\sim1800$ km. We find that this value of $L_d$ is largely constant throughout the atmosphere, and does not have an appreciable meridional gradient.