31 May 2013

Saturn's Hurricane

Many articles and blog posts about Saturn's north polar hurricane.  I'll point you to the NASA press release for some viewing and discussion of the Saturn side of things.

No complete answer here, but I'll raise the flag that one of the movies and set of papers I watched and read in graduate school was under the title "The Range and Unity of Planetary Circulations".  Additional flag: my bachelor's degree was in applied mathematics.  We argued that if you understood the mathematics behind things, you could rapidly move from one area where a certain math applied to any other area where it applied.  Geophysical Fluid Dynamics is one such.  Notwithstanding the name, it applies to any area where you have a fluid on a rotating body -- whether it's Saturn, the earth, the Sun, or Venus.

Coincidentally, I've been playing with a fluid dynamic model, nominally of the earth, but it could be Saturn just as well, and have a movie which I'm still trying to figure out how to share.  This movie has some characteristics which look a lot like the press release.

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