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Planetary science

Arrow in Titan's sky

Nature Geoscience volume 4, pages 582–583 (2011)Cite this article

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An exotic arrow-shaped cloud was discovered in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan last year. Numerical modelling shows how a large-scale atmospheric wave can naturally shape tropical clouds to such an arrow.

The lower atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan harbours spotty and streaky methane clouds. These clouds produce rainfall from time to time. Observations have so far focused on the location and timing of cloud occurrence, because both features are quite different from those of terrestrial clouds. Their shape or orientation, on the other hand, had received less attention — until a big, mysterious cloud in the form of an arrow appeared in the tropical sky of Titan1. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Mitchell and colleagues2 use a three-dimensional climate model to explain the dynamics of Titan's tropical weather.

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Figure 1: Cloud in Titan's tropics.

NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tetsuya Tokano is at the Institut für Geophysik und Meteorologie, Universität zu Köln, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany,

    Tetsuya Tokano

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  1. Tetsuya Tokano
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Correspondence to Tetsuya Tokano.

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Tokano, T. Arrow in Titan's sky. Nature Geosci 4, 582–583 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1236

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