Although Saturn is considered a more beautiful planet than its neighbour Jupiter, its weather is no less violent. It spins so quickly that it bulges at its centre, creating 1600k/ph (1,000mph) winds. Every 30 Earth years, a giant raging storm breaks out on Saturn, spreading across the entire planet. Such storms start when bubbles of hot gas rise up in the atmosphere.
Jupiter is well known for the storms that rage across its upper atmosphere, especially the Great Red Spot. But Saturn has storms too. They’re not as large, intense or large lived, but compared to Earth, they’re enormous. And Saturn has one of the big mysteries in the Solar System; a hexagon-shaped storms at its poles.
Winds blow hard on Saturn. The highest velocities are near the equator, where easterly blowing winds can reach speeds of 1,800 km/h. The wind speeds drop off as you travel towards the poles. Like Jupiter, storms can appear in the bands that circle the planet. One of the largest of these was the Great White Spot, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. These storms seem to appear once every year on Saturn (once every 30 Earth years).
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered static hexagonal storm circling around Saturn’s North Pole, including a clearly defined eye wall – just like a hurricane. Each side on the northern polar hexagon is approximately 13,800 km long, and the whole structure rotates once every 10 hours and 39 minutes; the same as a day on Saturn.
Here’s an article about a time when Cassini tracked a long-lived lighting on Saturn, and another about the strange “Dragon Strom” seen in the planet’s southern hemisphere.
Picture Credit : Google
