Thunder Storms on Jupiter

Anvil clouds tower more than 30 miles high. Amid the gathering gloom, 100 mph winds whip clouds across the sky. Painfully brilliant lightning flashes punctuate the tumult. Meanwhile, clouds from another giant storm dump several inches of water, every day, over an area more than 600 miles across.

Given the supernatural severity of these storms, and thunderheads three times higher than we see on our planet, we are clearly not on the Earth. Welcome to the super-storms of Jupiter.

The giant planet of the Solar System is as different from the Earth as any planet could be. Jupiter is big enough to fit 1300 Earths inside, and it is made of gas and liquid throughout. Yet some of its storms are remarkably similar - though vaster in scale - to thunderstorms on Earth. Even stranger, the latest results from NASA's Galileo spacecraft reveal that these storms are powered in a completely different way from terrestrial thunderstorms.

"There is a lot of activity we see on Jupiter that we see on Earth," says Peter J. Gierasch, professor of astronomy at Cornell University. Along with colleagues from Cornell, the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Gierasch has been studying views of Jupiter taken by Galileo on May 4, 1999. He continues: "We see jet streams, large cyclonic elements, large anti-cyclonic elements and many elements of unpredictability and turbulence."

Of all the tempest-tossed storms in the Solar System, the astronomers chose to examine an area west of the giant planet's Great Red Spot, in a region known as the South Equatorial Belt. The images were part of a planned effort to search for local convection, and study its details.