Modeling Atmospheric Circulation of Brown Dwarfs

Atmospheric Circulation of Brown Dwarfs: Jets, Vortices, and Time Variability

Authors:

Zhang et al

Abstract:

A variety of observational evidence demonstrates that brown dwarfs exhibit active atmospheric circulations. In this study we use a shallow-water model to investigate the global atmospheric dynamics in the stratified layer overlying the convective zone on these rapidly rotating objects. We show that the existence and properties of the atmospheric circulation crucially depend on key parameters including the energy injection rate and radiative timescale. Under conditions of strong internal heat flux and weak radiative dissipation, a banded flow pattern comprising east-west jet streams spontaneously emerges from the interaction of atmospheric turbulence with the planetary rotation. In contrast, when the internal heat flux is weak and/or radiative dissipation is strong, turbulence injected into the atmosphere damps before it can self-organize into jets, leading to a flow dominated by isotropic turbulence and vortices instead. Based on the location of the transition, we suggest that many brown dwarfs may exhibit atmospheric circulations dominated by turbulence and vortices (rather than jets) due to the strong radiative damping on these worlds, but a jet structure is also possible under some conditions. Our simulated light curves capture important features from observed infrared lightcurves of brown dwarfs, including amplitude variations of a few percent and shapes that fluctuate between single-peak and multi-peak structures. More broadly, our work shows that the shallow-water system provides a useful tool to illuminate fundamental aspects of the dynamics on these worlds.