New approach towards solving the storm puzzle 

Professor Klas Modin will receive funding from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to recruit an international researcher for a postdoctoral position at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers University of Technology.

In 1665, when astronomer Giovanni Cassini from Bologna pointed his telescope at Jupiter, he was amazed to find a red spot swirling just below the planet’s equator. We now know that the red spot is a continuous gigantic storm, large enough to swallow the Earth, in one of Jupiter’s atmospheric layers. Similar storms, albeit less long-lived, occur in our own atmosphere. How and why do these storms arise? The aim of the project is to gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying large-scale atmospheric and oceanic flow patterns that affect life on Earth.

The most fundamental mathematical model for two-dimensional turbulent flows was formulated by Leonhard Euler in Basel in 1757. Despite these flows being studied by both mathematicians and physicists for over two centuries, Euler’s equations are notoriously difficult to solve. So far, experiments and computer simulations have been used to recreate the origin of the storms, but there are no rigorous mathematical solutions that describe how they form and why they are so stable. 

A new approach to the problem of two-dimensional flows’ long-term behaviour is combining numerical methods with quantum theory. Here, the theory is used to approximate the equations for atmospheric flows via matrix equations. Using high-performance cluster computers, the solutions can be calculated while all the flows’ properties are preserved, which is important for capturing the correct long-term behaviour. This provides a new method for approaching the question of why Jupiter’s red spot is so long-lasting.