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Winds in the Middle Cloud Deck From the Near-IR Imaging by the Venus Monitoring Camera Onboard Venus Express

Fedorova, A. A.; Ignatiev, N. I.; Markiewicz, W. J. +4 more

For more than 8 years the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) onboard the Venus Express orbiter performed continuous imaging of the Venus cloud layer in UV, visible and near-IR filters. We applied the correlation approach to sequences of the near-IR images at 965 nm to track cloud features and determine the wind field in the middle and lower cloud (49-5…

Three-dimensional turbulence-resolving modeling of the Venusian cloud layer and induced gravity waves

Lebonnois, Sébastien; Spiga, Aymeric; Lefèvre, Maxence

The impact of the cloud convective layer of the atmosphere of Venus on the global circulation remains unclear. The recent observations of gravity waves at the top of the cloud by the Venus Express mission provided some answers. These waves are not resolved at the scale of global circulation models (GCM); therefore, we developed an unprecedented 3-…

Vertical structure of the axi-asymmetric temperature disturbance in the Venusian polar atmosphere: Comparison between radio occultation measurements and GCM results

Tellmann, Silvia; Pätzold, Martin; Imamura, Takeshi +6 more

Vertical temperature profiles at 40-75 km around 80°N in the Venus polar vortex are retrieved over 13 Earth days almost continuously from radio occultation measurements (Venus Express radio occultation) in the Venus Express mission. They show periodical variations with a dominant period of ∼3.1 Earth days. These fluctuations are confined in an alt…

Search for active lava flows with VIRTIS on Venus Express

Drossart, P.; Piccioni, G.; Smrekar, S. +3 more

The Visible Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) instrument on Venus Express observed thermal emission from the surface of Venus at 1 µm wavelength and thus would have detected sufficiently bright incandescent lava flows. No eruptions were detected in the observations between April 2006 and October 2008, covering an area equivalent…