Moist convection in hydrogen atmospheres and the frequency of Saturn’s giant storms

Abstract:

A giant planet-encircling storm occurred on Saturn on Dec. 5th, 2010 at planetographic latitude 37.7 N. It produced intense lightning, created enormous cloud disturbances and wrapped around the planet in 6 months. Six such storms, called Great White Spots, have erupted since 1876. They have alternated between mid-latitudes and the equator at intervals ranging from 20 to 30 years. The reason for the intermittent explosion is not clear and there are no similar storms on brother Jupiter. Here we describe the water-loading mechanism, which could suppress moist convection for decades due to the larger molecular weight of water in a hydrogen-helium atmosphere. We show that this mechanism requires the deep water vapor mixing ratio to be greater than 1.0%, which implies O/H at least 10 times the solar value. Observations imply that Saturn’s atmosphere is more enriched in water than Jupiter, which could explain why Saturn has such storms and Jupiter does not. We further use a two-dimensional axisymmetric dynamic model and a top-cooling convective adjustment scheme to connect our theory to observation. We show that for a deep water vapor mixing ratio of 1.1%, the ammonia vapor is depleted down to 6 bars, the tropospheric warming is ~6 K, and the interval between two consecutive storms at one latitude is ~70 years. These values are consistent with observations.