Venus atmospheric circulation: Known and unknown

Abstract

After a pause of more than two decades, Venus' atmosphere is being explored again. Since April 2006, European Space Agency's Venus Express has been acquiring data, exploiting the near‐infrared windows that allow us to peer into the deep night‐side atmosphere. In June 2007, NASA's MESSENGER mission will fly past Venus on its way to Mercury, collecting useful data for a few weeks. Instruments and experiments on Venus Express are expected to provide a more comprehensive set of atmospheric observations over three and perhaps more Venus days. Venus Express observations are already providing clues about the processes that maintain the rapid circulation of Venus' atmosphere. The early observations show not only that the global circulation is organized into two hemispheric vortices centered over respective poles, but also that the vortex organization extends deep into the atmosphere. The limited Galileo NIMS near‐infrared observations in 1989 had revealed the deep circulation in the equatorial regions, but because of the spacecraft, flyby trajectory could not observe the high latitudes to elucidate the polar circulation and its organization. The long hiatus in systematic Venus observations has provided an opportunity to perform some new analysis of the previous Pioneer Venus observations. This paper presents a synopsis of the circulation measurements at high latitudes and an analysis of the solar thermal tides seen in the cloud motions and suggests some limitations of previous estimates of transport of angular momentum by eddies.