Jupiter's weather is currently undergoing a great change with multiple eruptions, the appearance of a new red spot, disturbances at, and south of, the equator and a shrinking Great Red Spot. The rapidity of this current upheaval is without precedent. This project will map Jupiter's velocity fields in all regions (except the poles) with errors smaller than five meters per second, which will result in vorticity maps with only 15% uncertainties. The velocity field maps will be made with recently tested automated techniques of measuring cloud motion from satellite images obtained over the last three decades by Voyager, Cassini, Galileo and, more recently, the Hubble Space Telescope. Numerical simulations that include the unobserved atmospheric parameters (vertical stratification, vertical changes in wind speed, and others) will find the 'best fit' choice by a genetic algorithm. The research should lead to a better understanding of both short- and long-term climate change on Jupiter, with possible application even to Earth's climate.
As well as training a graduate student and a post-doc in astrophysics, high performance computation, and velocity extraction, the methods developed during this research should be useful for studies of stars. The team is also trying to develop them for bio-engineering, where they show promise for improving motion capture studies.
