JUPITER GREAT RED SPOT - COMPACTNESS CONDITION AND STABILITY

Linear Rossby wave dispersion relationships suggest that Jupiter's Gre at Red Spot (GRS) is a baroclinic structure embedded in a barotropic s hearing zonal flow. Quasi-Geostrophic (QG) two-layer simulations suppo rt the theory, as long as an infinitely deep zonal flow is assumed. Ho wever. once a finite depth of the lower layer is assumed, a self-inter action of the baroclinic eddy component produces a barotropic radiatin g field, so that the GRS-like eddy can no longer remain compact. Compa ctness is recovered by explicitly introducing a deep dynamics of the i nterior for the lower layer, instead of the shallow QG formulation. An implication of the result is a strong coupling of the GRS to a convec tively active interior.