The Jovian Atmospheres

This book reviews the current state of knowledge of the atmospheres of the giant gaseous planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The current theories of their formation are reviewed and their recently observed temperature, composition and cloud structures are contrasted and compared with simple thermodynamic, radiative transfer and dynamical models. The instruments and techniques that have been used to remotely measure their atmospheric properties are also reviewed, and the likely development of outer planet observations over the next two decades is outlined. This second edition has been extensively updated following the Cassini mission results for Jupiter/Saturn and the newest ground-based measurements for Uranus/Neptune as well as on the latest development in the theories on planet formation.

The frequent eclipses of the Galilean satellites provide an extremely simple yet extremely powerful method for monitoring the physical structure of the Jovian atmosphere in time, latitude, and longitude. In this paper, all theoretical and observational problems involved in the use of these eclipses to scan the Jovian atmosphere are discussed in detail. It is shown that a rather complete knowledge of the structure of the Jovian atmosphere immediately above the cloud layer may be obtained from multicolor photometry of the refraction tails of the ingress light curves of the satellites. The relevant observational data may be obtained readily using currently available ground-based astronomical equipment. This technique for inferring the physical structure of a planetary atmosphere may be applied to Saturn also. In that case, the relatively infrequent eclipses of Titan may be utilized.

Planets and Their Atmospheres: Origin and Evolution

Our subject is, of course, nothing more than applied physics and chemistry. But in addition to those basic sciences the student of planetary atmospheres needs an overview of atmospheric structure and physical processes as presently understood. This book is intended to help fill that need for both graduate students and research scientists. Although the approach is mainly theoretical, very little basic physics is developed here. Material that is standard fare in third- and fourth-year physics courses is simply absorbed where needed.