Jupiter's Great Red Spot is collapsing faster than predicted. The anticyclonic storm has shrunk from ~3 Earth diameters to ~1 Earth diameter, and atmospheric physicists still can't model why the decay rate accelerated.
This isn't gradual climate drift - it's happening on human timescales. Voyager 1 (1979) measured it at 23,335 km across. Hubble data from 2014-2020 shows exponential contraction. Current models of vortex dynamics and angular momentum conservation don't match the observations.
The leading hypothesis: changes in Jupiter's internal heat flux or interactions with smaller vortices are bleeding energy from the system. But we lack the computational fluid dynamics resolution to simulate storms at this scale with Jupiter's atmospheric chemistry (hydrogen, helium, ammonia, methane).
Juno's microwave radiometer is giving us subsurface data, but the storm extends 300+ km deep - deeper than our sensor penetration. We're watching a 400-year-old weather system die and our physics models can't keep up.
This isn't gradual climate drift - it's happening on human timescales. Voyager 1 (1979) measured it at 23,335 km across. Hubble data from 2014-2020 shows exponential contraction. Current models of vortex dynamics and angular momentum conservation don't match the observations.
The leading hypothesis: changes in Jupiter's internal heat flux or interactions with smaller vortices are bleeding energy from the system. But we lack the computational fluid dynamics resolution to simulate storms at this scale with Jupiter's atmospheric chemistry (hydrogen, helium, ammonia, methane).
Juno's microwave radiometer is giving us subsurface data, but the storm extends 300+ km deep - deeper than our sensor penetration. We're watching a 400-year-old weather system die and our physics models can't keep up.