INFINA (EX INFIP)   05545
INSTITUTO DE FISICA INTERDISCIPLINARIA Y APLICADA
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
Simple model of the wave pattern in the atmosphere of a slow rotating planet due to surface irregularities
Autor/es:
VIGH, CARLOS; MINOTTI, FERNANDO; MAYOCHI, MARIANO; CIRILO-LOMBARDO, DIEGO
Revista:
PLANETARY AND SPACE SCIENCE
Editorial:
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
Referencias:
Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2020 vol. 184
ISSN:
0032-0633
Resumen:
Recent observations show a persistent pattern on Venus surface, interpreted as a stationary wave due to theinteraction of the prevailing winds with the orography of the planet. In this work we use an idealized model of thephenomenon that allows for a fully analytical solution applied to a slow rotating planet with idealized obstacles.We use Venus as a testing case. Taking advantage of the high Rossby number of the atmospheric flow in Venus wemodel the velocity as potential and solve the stationary shallow-water equations on a sphere, in which a base flowis perturbed by the orography. The corresponding Green function is derived and the atmosphere thicknessperturbation obtained as a convolution with the terrain height distribution. Delta-like terrain distributions givethus explicit expressions of the atmosphere height pattern, that can be translated into temperature variations to becompared with observations in the case of Venus. In particular, it is found that the height perturbation due to alocalized obstacle has a longitudinal extension related to the latitudinal extension of the base flow, and quantifiedin terms of a latitudinal variable related to latitude in a non-linear way.