Folded Filamentary Regions (FFR)

By Maquet-80 on 2018-03-07 UT

This thread is dedicated to the observation and analysis of folded filamentary regions (FFRs).
The chaotic-appearing, and mostly cyclonic storms in Jupiter's subpolar latitudes are called folded filamentary regions.

Due to the design of Juno's trajectory, two major classes of observations are accessible for JunoCam, short-term observations performed within one perijove pass, and long-term observations over the lifetime of Juno's exploration of Jupiter.

Within a short-term observation period, one of the major goals is an analysis of wind fields within and between the Jupiter's FFRs.
Morphological considerations as well as time-lapse animations are a first step of describing the short-term dynamics of the storms.
Animations can be used as a basis for more advanced data reduction methods. Example reduction goals are wind fields approximated by maps of vectors describing cloud feature motion.
Further reduced are vorticity maps, or maps about the position, shape, size, color, texture, and internal structure of the storms.
More FFR-specific is the short-term interaction with jets and nearby anticyclones, or with interior eddies, including their birth and propagation.

FFRs are rather short-lived, and therefore hard to correlate between two consecutive perijoves.
Long-term observations can therefore consider the evolution of statistical properties of sets or latitudes of FFRs over longer time scales.
Is there any correlation to fixed L3 longitudes? Is it possible to derive any kind of periodicity in time? Are FFRs and their statistical properties correlated to other changes on Jupiter?

A more abstract set of questions are related to topological studies: Are there homeomorphisms or diffeomorphisms that simplify the structure and dynamics of FFRs down to a smaller class of abstract storms in a reasonable way?
Can we find regular patterns in these abstracted descriptions of the FFRs? Do the topological morphisms follow some general patterns?
Which constraints are given by the rules of hydrodynamics? Do the FFRs respect these rules, or do we need to add an MHD component? Which conclusions can we make about the depth of the FFRs?
How do FFRs interact with overlying haze? If the FFRs turn out to be shallow, how do they interact with the underlying layer? Which conclusions are possible from JunoCam images?

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1 Comment

  1. comment by Candy on 2018-04-14 02:32 UT
    JUNO SPECIALIST

    This is really a great animation Gerald!  Very interesting flows...