All articles tagged with #hydraulic jump
Astronomers using data from JAXA's Akatsuki probe identify the largest hydraulic jump in the solar system, where turbulence in Venus's lower cloud layer triggers a strong updraft that lofts sulfuric acid vapor into the upper clouds, creating a giant, slow-moving cloud front.
Scientists have identified a planetary-scale hydraulic jump—driven by a Kelvin wave—in Venus’s thick CO2-sulfuric acid atmosphere that forms a 3,700-mile-wide cloud wall racing around the planet every few days, faster than Venus’s rotation. This cross-scale coupling links large-scale winds to localized vertical motion, a mechanism missing from current global circulation models and potentially key to understanding Venus’s extreme super-rotation. The finding reshapes how researchers model Venus’s climate and points to updates ahead of upcoming missions such as DAVINCI, VERITAS, and EnVision.
Scientists show that Venus’s 30-mile-high sulfuric acid clouds are generated by the solar system’s largest hydraulic jump, a vertical updraft triggered by a planet-wide eastward Kelvin wave that lifts sulfuric acid vapor to about 50 km, creating a massive cloud bank. The finding, based on new modeling, represents the first observed hydraulic jump on a planet beyond Earth and was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets.
A study of Venus, using Akatsuki data, shows that gigantic hydraulic jumps push sulfuric acid vapor upward into the lower-to-middle cloud layers, creating planet-spanning cloud fronts that can reach about 6,000 km and likely help sustain Venus’s extreme superrotation, resolving decades of mystery and offering clues for future missions and potentially similar processes on Mars.
Researchers show Venus’s colossal 6,000-km atmospheric wave results from the solar system’s largest hydraulic jump: when eastward lower-cloud flows slow abruptly, a strong vertical updraft lifts sulfuric acid vapor and creates a massive cloud disturbance that may help sustain Venus’s superrotation. The finding, based on advanced fluid-dynamics simulations and microphysical modeling, explains why previous Earth-centric models missed the phenomenon and outlines steps to incorporate this mechanism into broader Venus climate models, with potential implications for future Mars research.