DPS Meeting, Madison, October 1998
Session 30P. Jupiter I
Contributed Poster Session, Wednesday, October 14, 1998, 5:10-6:10pm, Hall of Ideas

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[30P.11] A System of Circumpolar Waves in Jupiter's Stratosphere

A Sanchez-Lavega, R Hueso (Universidad del Pais Vasco, Bilbao, Spain), J. R. Acarreta (Laboratoria de Astrofísica Espacial y Física Fundamental, Madrid, Spain)

We report on the optical identification on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Voyager 1 archived images, of a circumpolar system of Jovian stratospheric quasi-stationary waves, centered at planetographic latitudes -53\circ, -62\circ and -67\circ with averaged zonal wavenumbers 23, 11 and 12 respectively. The most conspicuous wave is detected in the 890-nm strong absoption band of methane at -67\circ latitude. Its amplitude changes in a matter of days, stretching and contracting but preserving the number of components in the latitude circle. This wave has been observed during several years and seems to be a persistent long-term phenomena in Jupiter's atmosphere.


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