Once every 30 years or so, or roughly one Saturnian year, a monster storm rips across the northern hemisphere of the ringed planet. In 2010, the most recent and only the sixth giant storm on Saturn¹ observed by humans began stirring. It quickly grew to superstorm proportions, reaching 15,000 kilometers in width and visible to amateur astronomers² on Earth as a great white spot dancing across the surface of the planet.

 

Now, thanks to near-infrared³ spectral⁴ measurements taken by NASA's Cassini orbiter and analysis of near-infrared color signatures by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Saturn's superstorm is helping⁵ scientists flesh out a picture of the composition of the planet's atmosphere at depths typically obscured by a thick high-altitude haze⁶.

 

The key finding: cloud particles at the top of the great storm are composed of a mix of three substances: water ice, ammonia（氨） ice, and an uncertain third constituent⁷ that is possibly ammonium（氨盐基） hydrosulfide. According to the Wisconsin researchers, the observations are consistent with clouds of different chemical compositions existing side-by-side, although a more likely scenario⁸ is that the individual cloud particles are composed of two or all three of the materials.

 

Writing in the current edition (Sept. 9, 2013) of the journal Icarus, a team led by UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center planetary scientists Lawrence Sromovsky, and including Kevin Baines and Patrick Fry, reports the discovery of the icy forms of water and ammonia. Water in the form of ice has never before been observed on Saturn.

 

"We think this huge thunderstorm is driving these cloud particles upward, sort of like a volcano bringing up material from the depths and making it visible from outside the atmosphere," explains Sromovsky, a senior scientist at UW-Madison and an expert on planetary atmospheres. "The upper haze is so optically pretty thick that it is only in the stormy regions where the haze is penetrated⁹ by powerful updrafts that you can see evidence for the ammonia ice and the water ice. Those storm particles have an infrared color signature that is very different from the haze particles in the surrounding atmosphere."

 

Scientists believe Saturn's atmosphere is a layered sandwich of sorts, with a deck of water clouds at the bottom, ammonia hydrosulfide clouds in the middle, and ammonia clouds near the top, just below an upper tropospheric（对流层的） haze of unknown composition that obscures almost everything.

 

The latest great storm on Saturn and the presence of the Cassini probe now orbiting the planet gave scientists a chance to peek¹⁰ beneath the haze and learn more about the dynamics¹¹ and chemical composition of the planet's deep atmosphere.

 

First noticed by amateur astronomers, the massive storm works like the much smaller convective events on Earth, where air and water vapor¹² are pushed high into the atmosphere, resulting in the towering, billowing clouds of a thunderstorm. On Saturn, not only are the storms much bigger, they are far more violent, with models predicting vertical¹³（垂直的） winds of more than 300 miles per hour for these rare giant storms.

 

The effect, Sromovsky says, is to loft¹⁴ the aerosols¹⁵ found deep in the atmosphere to the visible cloud tops, providing a rare glimpse of normally hidden materials. "It starts at the water cloud level and develops a huge convective tower. It is similar to a big thunderstorm, only 10 to 20 times taller and covering an even greater area," he explains.

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