Program: GN-2009B-Q-85

Uranus and Neptune are very similar in terms of mean size and composition, but they have hugely different atmospheric circulations. Uranus is found to be in almost perfect radiative balance with incoming sunlight, while Neptune emits over 2.5 times as much heat as it receives. The atmospheric circulation of Neptune is found to be much more vigorous than Uranus' with light and dark spots seen at a number of latitudes and vigorous convection seen at mid-latitudes. In addition, recent observations have shown there to be a hot spot at Neptune's tropopause (100mb) at 70S, offset from the regular polar cyclonic vortex seen in other giant planet atmospheres such as Saturn's. We propose to use near-IR spectroscopy with Gemini/NIFS to map the vertical and latitudinal cloud structure of Neptune, explore these anomolous regions, and also measure the limb-darkening curves at different latitudes, which places strong constraints on the vertical cloud structure.