Potential Gravity-Wave Signatures in Jupiter’s Atmosphere from Juno Radio Occultations

Radio occultation experiments represent one of the main tools available to sound the atmospheres of celestial bodies, providing vertically resolved information on refractivity and thermal properties with high altitude resolution. In these experiments, a spacecraft’s radio signal is tracked as it propagates through the atmospheric limb, and the resulting changes in its frequency are used to retrieve refractivity profiles and infer temperature and density as a function of altitude.

Over the last two years, Juno has performed numerous radio occultation experiments, significantly expanding the latitudinal and longitudinal coverage of Jupiter’s atmosphere with respect to the Pioneer and Voyager era, and enabling the first close‐up investigations of the planet’s polar regions. These measurements provide a unique opportunity to explore the vertical structure of Jupiter’s atmosphere across a wide range of dynamical regimes. In a subset of the available data, the retrieved temperature–pressure profiles exhibit oscillatory features superimposed on the background stratification, which may be consistent with the presence of wave‐like structures in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

We explore the working hypothesis that such oscillations could arise from gravity‐wave‐induced perturbations of refractivity along the occultation path, which may be preserved in the retrieved vertical profiles. Identifying gravity‐wave signatures in radio occultation data is inherently challenging, as it relies on high‐precision background characterisation and because the expected signals can be comparable in amplitude to background variability and retrieval noise.

To investigate this possibility, we apply a dedicated analysis to the occultation‐derived vertical profiles, aimed at separating large‐scale background structures from smaller‐scale perturbations and testing whether the residuals exhibit coherent, wave‐like properties. The analysis combines diagnostics in both spectral and physical space, allowing candidate signals to be evaluated in terms of their characteristic vertical scales, phase behaviour, and amplitude structure. A conservative approach is adopted throughout, with the objective of minimising false detections in the presence of strong background variability and measurement noise. We will present representative case studies from Juno radio occultations and discuss their implications for the detection and interpretation of potential gravity‐wave signatures in Jupiter’s atmosphere.