Laboratory simulation of Jupiter's great red spot by rotating shallow water

Abstract

A series of repeatable simulation tests have been carried out on an experimental system that forms a shallow water layer with free surface on a rotating paraboloid. Photographs taken in a reference frame rotating with the system and results of power spectrum analysis show that large-scale persistent vortices, along with their drifts and evolution are really generated. Under certain conditions, a self-persistent and long-lived anticyclonic solitary vortex drifting in direction opposite to the global rotation of the system appears. This structure is interpreted as the Rossby solitary vortex and taken as a laboratory model of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The experimental results demonstrate that hydrodynamic instability comes from the effects of shear and Coriolis force, and that large-scale, long-lived coherent vortical structure emerges out of the self-organization of a dissipative system far from the equilibrium state. Inspired by many experiments, we put forward a semi-empirical model from the fundamental equations of hydrodynamics for certain experimental conditions and derived approximately the solution of Rossby solitary vortex.