Earth's Oceanic Currents and Jupiter's Bands

Earth's oceanic currents and Jupiter's bands bear a certain resemblance to each other, a new report suggests. The work consists of comparisons of the stripes visible in Jupiter's upper atmosphere and zones of water at a depth of 1000 meters stretching across the Pacific Ocean on Earth. The gas jets on Jupiter and the ocean currents on Earth not only look alike, but the energy spectra of each are characterized by a downward sloping "power law" curve; that is, the likelihood of jets of a certain size is proportional to the size raised to a power. The oceanographers working on this study themselves stretch halfway across the world, coming from the University of South Florida (US), the Meteorological Research Institute (Japan), Columbia University (US), and the Ben-Gurion University (Israel). (Galperin et al., Geophysical Research Letters, June 2004)