Drifting Ice Giant Dark Spots And Their Potential Connections To Terrestrial Hurricanes

Abstract

The natural disasters associated with hurricane Sandy are but one example of the dangers presented by hurricanes and typhoons. Predicting the track of these features remains a significant meteorological challenge, with predictive models often diverging significantly within a couple of days. The difficulty of hurricane prediction is linked to the number of factors influencing their movement, including ocean temperature and currents, land masses, broader weather patterns, the jet stream, cloud microphysics, and the coriolis effect. All of these factors help mask the underlying mechanisms driving hurricane drift and thereby limiting our understanding of these phenomena. However, terrestrial hurricanes are not the only example of coherent, drifting atmospheric vortices. The first Great Dark Spot, a geophysical vortex discovered by Voyager II on Neptune in 1989, drifted about 10 degrees in latitude over eight months of direct observation. In 2005, a long lived cloud feature on Uranus called the “Berg” suddenly began to drift towards the equator at a rate of several degrees per year, an event possibly linked to a hidden vortex beneath the clouds. These systems, with no land or oceans and simpler background weather patterns, may provide a more straightforward analysis of vortex drift than terrestrial features while sharing fundamental mechanisms that drive the motion. Improvements to a current General Circulation Model used to analyze the Ice Giant atmospheres now allow a more detailed investigation of these drifting vortices and the possible connections between their motions and those of hurricanes.

Publication Date

1-1-2016

Publication Title

8th AIAA Atmospheric and Space Environments Conference

Document Type

Article; Proceedings Paper

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2016-4198

Socpus ID

85085849209 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85085849209

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