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Abstract:

Jupiter represents a class of planets whose major composition is hydrogen and helium, with a few condensable species forming visible clouds high up. Jovian atmospheres typically feature multiple zonal jets at the speed of hundreds of meters per second, and incessant popping of small-scale storms and vortices. The ongoing Juno mission has told us the depth of the zonal winds, the abundance of the water and the complex pattern of the swirling vortices in three-dimension. I will introduce the major findings of the Juno mission regarding Jupiter’s weather layer and discuss the role of atmospheric dynamics in shaping Jupiter’s structure and the observed composition.

About the speaker:

Dr. Li graduated from Peking University, School of Physics in 2011. After graduation, he went to Caltech for his Ph.D. He studied moist convection on giant planets and received his Ph.D. in 2017. Then he was awarded the NASA postdoc program fellow and stayed at JPL working on the Juno mission. His work at the Juno team is to infer Jupiter’s atmospheric structure using the Juno microwave radiometer. He is currently the Co-I of the Juno mission. In 2019, he switched to the 51 Peg b postdoc fellow at UC Berkeley supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. He joined the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in 2021. He develops hydrodynamic code to simulate moist convection and spectral inversion algorithms to infer atmospheric conditions via remote sensing.

Audience in the world:

(image credit: timeanddate.com)

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