Bridging The Atmospheric Circulations Of Hot And Warm Giant Exoplanets

We perform high-resolution atmospheric flow simulations of hot and warm giant exoplanets that are tidally locked.

The modeled atmospheres are representative of those on KELT-11b and WASP-39b, which possess markedly different equilibrium temperatures but reside in a similar dynamical regime: in this regime, their key dynamical numbers (e.g., Rossby and Froude numbers) are comparable.

Despite their temperature difference, both planets exhibit qualitatively similar atmospheric circulation patterns, which are characterized by turbulent equatorial flows, anticyclonic polar vortices, and large-scale Rossby waves that gives rise to quasi-zonal flows in the extra-tropics (i.e., near ~20 degrees).

Quantitative differences between the KELT-11b and WASP-39b atmospheres reflect their different Rossby deformation scales, which influence the horizontal length scale of wave–vortex interactions and the overall structure of the circulation.

A log(|q(λ, ϕ, p)|), where q is the potential vorticity in units of 10−6 K m2 kg⁻¹ s ⁻¹ , and B temperature T(λ, ϕ, p) fields in units of K, at time t = 200 τ_p for T341L50 simulations of tidally synchronized hot and warm gas giant exoplanets (HP and WP, respectively). Fields are shown for p ∈ {0.15, 0.95, 4.95} bar. These p-levels are near the top, middle, and bottom of the simulation domains. Fields are shown in Mollweide projection, centered on the substellar point (λ, ϕ) = (0◦ , 0◦ ) where λ is the longitude and ϕ is the latitude. White horizontal dashed lines indicate the latitudes ϕ ∈ {0 ◦ , ±30◦ , ±60◦ }, and the white dashed circle indicates the dayside–nightside boundary. — astro-ph.EP

J. W. Skinner, S. Wei

Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures, submitted to APJ
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2505.01397 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2505.01397v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.01397
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Submission history
From: Jack Skinner
[v1] Fri, 2 May 2025 17:13:42 UTC (8,916 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01397
Astrobiology,