The Thermal Structure of Jupiter from Infrared Spectral Measurements by Means of a Filtered Iterative Inversion Method

Abstract

The present study describes a filtering procedure to invert the radiative transfer equation which combines the advantages of the fast convergence of Chahine's method and the stability properties inherent in filtering. This procedure is used to invert available spectral infrared measurements of Jupiter. A set of Jovian thermal profiles is retrieved as a function of the temperature at the 0.1 mb level where temperature values from ? Scorpio occultation measurements are available. The tropopause is distinctly sharper than the one existing in models computed with the assumption of convective radiative equilibrium. In order to fit the data of the 7.7 µm spectrum of Jupiter, the temperature at the 0.1 mb level cannot exceed 200 K. The relative abundance of Jovian molecular hydrogen was inferred and found to be q = 0.88 ± 0.06. The Jovian effective temperature corresponding to the inferred thermal profiles is Te = 129.45 ± 1.2 K.