Probing Jupiter’s Atmosphere through Juno Radio Occultations: Analysis of the Atmospheric Thermal Structure

The upper layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere, offering critical insights into the planet’s deeper structure, are accessible through radio occultation experiments. Since July 2023, NASA’s Juno extended mission has provided the first high resolution radio occultation measurements since the Voyager era, probing the thermal structure and composition down to approximately 0.5 bar. We use these measurements to study Jupiter’s latitudinally dependent vertical thermal structure. We observe cooler stratospheric and warmer tropospheric temperatures at the equatorial region compared to mid- and high-latitudes, and temporal variations in the North Equatorial Belt’s thermal structure on a time scale of a few months. These observations align with mid-infrared data from Cassini’s CIRS and ground-based current TEXES observations, as well as previous studies based on Voyager radio occultations and the Galileo probe, offering a robust view of Jupiter’s lower stratosphere and upper troposphere thermal structure.