Evolution of Jupiter‐Style Critical Latitudes: Initial Laboratory Altimetry Results
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This is a laboratory zonal‐jet study using a rotating water tank. The bottom topography has a tent‐shaped radial cross section designed to generate two critical latitudes, that is, two positions where β e , the radial gradient of the potential vorticity (PV), changes sign. This configuration is motivated by observations indicating that Jupiter and Saturn have not only multiple zonal jets, but multiple stable critical latitudes. It is known that “supersonic” critical latitudes (with respect to Rossby waves) are stable, whereas “subsonic” critical latitudes are posited to be unstable. Because Rossby waves are unidirectional, “supersonic” critical latitudes come in two varieties: Rossby Mach number M R > 1 and < 0, where the latter holds when the waves are directed downstream. Experiments focus on: (a) how do zonal jets emerge from localized forcing in a system with alternating PV gradients? and (b) what differences are there between the evolution of various types of critical latitudes? The water is forced by mass injection along one radius. Laboratory altimetry provides accurate, unobtrusive records of the circulations that reveal the emergence of counter‐propagating β ‐plumes (Rossby‐wave envelopes), which expand into tank‐encircling zonal jets. The tank's negative β e zone (annulus) is characterized by M R ∼ 1. The weaker critical latitude adjusts its position by about 4% of the tank radius and maintains M R ∼ 1, similar to the state surmised for Jupiter and Saturn, whereas the stronger critical latitude vacillates while maintaining | M R | ≪ 1 and may be relevant to steep oceanic seamounts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".