The Great Red Spot,

 The Great Red Spot, a persistent storm in Jupiter's atmosphere, is the most prominent feature of that planet's disk as viewed from Earth. Combined with the fact that Jupiter is a gas giant planet and has no visible surface with discernible landmarks, this means that following the passage of the Great Red Spot is the primary method of observing the planet's rotation. Therefore, it is paramount for any program which generates synthetic images of the planet to accurately place the feature. The U.S. Naval Observatory's "Apparent Disk of a Solar System Object" online web service (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/diskmap.php) is such a program. The Great Red Spot's planetary latitude is locked between two of Jupiter's striated atmospheric layers at 22 °S. However, its planetary longitude is not constant; over time it migrates east and west along the atmospheric layer boundary it is trapped within. Observing and recording its longitude is made difficult because Jupiter's atmosphere is subject to differential rotation and the Great Red Spot slowly migrates with respect to the surrounding atmospheric layers. Furthermore, the Great Red Spot does not move at a uniform rate. Currently its relative motion is approximately 0°.051 per day. Since its first recorded observation in 1831, the Great Red Spot has made almost three complete laps around the planet at the 22nd parallel. "Apparent Disk of a Solar System Object" operates over any requested date between 1700 and 2100 A.D. Therefore, our treatment of the Great Red Spot needs to take into account both historical positions and future predicted motion. Based on researching past observations of the spot's position on the disk, we find that its behavior prior to 2009 is best represented by a 10-part piecewise function. Each component of the piecewise function is a 2nd order polynomial. Observations from 2009-present are better fit with a linear function; this function is used for future years by extrapolation. Using these fits to observations requires occasional maintenance to the predictive function because the Great Red Spot's rate of longitude motion is non-uniform.

The International Planetary Patrol collection of Jupiter photographs is used to examine the development of a temporary spot that was visible in the northern equatorial zone for a total of 211 days. The motion and color of this spot are compared with those of the Great Red Spot. It is shown that the temporary spot was bluer than the Great Red Spot and has a longitudinal oscillation of approximately 4 deg with a period of about 45 days, implying that it may have possessed a significant dynamical property in common with other temporary spots and the Great Red Spot. It is concluded that the present spot is more likely to have been associated with a hole in the cloud deck rather than with an elevated surface feature.

Images of Jupiter at 5 microns reveal a dynamic range of about 20 in thermal emission between the hottest Hot Spots and the lowest flux regions on the planet. The Great Red Spot is dark at 5 microns due to thick clouds, but imaging alone does not reveal which cloud layers are responsible for attenuating this radiation. Initial expectations were that upper level clouds were sufficiently opaque that structure at the water cloud level would be completely hidden. Fortunately, this is not the case. We used NIRSPEC on the Keck telescope and CSHELL on the Infrared Telescope Facility to spectrally resolve line profiles of CH3D and other molecules on Jupiter in order to derive the pressure of the line formation region in the 5-micron window. Deuterated methane is a good choice for studying cloud structure because methane and its isotopologues do not condense on Jupiter. Variations in CH3D line shape with position on Jupiter are therefore ONLY due to cloud structure rather than due to changes in gas mole fraction. By aligning the slit east/west on Jupiter, we sampled the Great Red Spot and a Hot Spot 7 arcsec to the west. The profile of the CH3D lines is very broad in the Hot Spot due to collisions with up to 8 bars of H2, where unit optical depth due to collision induced H2 opacity occurs. The extreme width of these CH3D features implies that Hot Spots do not have significant cloud opacity where water is expected to condense. This is consistent with the Galileo probe results. Within the Great Red Spot, the line profiles are substantially narrower than in the Hot Spot, but they are broader than would be expected if they were formed in a column above an opaque cloud at 0.7 bars (NH3) or 2 bars (NH4SH). The best fit to the line shape of CH3D requires an opaque cloud at 5 bars, which we identify as being a water cloud. Gaseous H2O is clearly evident in the Great Red Spot, which provides independent evidence that we are sounding deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere. A combination of Keck and IRTF data will allow us to retrieve NH3, PH3, and gaseous H2O inside the Hot Spot and within the Great Red Spot. This technique can be applied to study the deep cloud structure anywhere on Jupiter whether or not upper level clouds are present.