Jovian vortex hunters contribute to storm study

Jumping Jupiter! The results are in, storm chasers! Thanks to your help over the last two years, the Jovian Vortex Hunter project has published a catalog of 7,222 vortices, which you can download. Each vortex is an enormous swirling windstorm in Jupiter’s atmosphere–terrifying yet beautiful to behold.

The vortices are labeled by color (“white” is most common, then “dark,” then “red”).

The catalog reveals distributions of vortex sizes, aspect ratios, and locations on the planet. For example, your work showed that white and dark vortices are preferentially found near the poles. These distributions help researchers derive general parameters about Jupiter’s atmosphere that can give us insights about its internal processes and the atmospheres of other planets.

More than 5,000 of you helped build this catalog by performing over a million classifications of images of Jupiter from the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno mission. The details of the catalog are now published in a paper in the Planetary Science Journal.

You can also learn more about this amazing volunteer effort in a video you can find on the Jovian Vortex Hunter Results webpage.Thanks to your efforts, The Jovian Vortex Hunter project is out of data. But you can work with JunoCam data in a different way by participating in NASA’s JunoCam citizen science project.