Talks My specific research experience with Jupiter's clouds--and the gases that form them--also relates to conditions in the early protoplanetary disk and dynamics of giant planet atmospheres. The interaction between photochemistry and clouds in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Titan may also provide an avenue for investigating processes leading to the synthesis of complex organic molecules in planetary atmospheres, including the atmosphere of the early Earth. The talks below organize my research into overarching themes in the science of planetary atmospheres. The talks can be geared towards audiences at the levels of Jupiter specialists, general planetary scientists, or the general public. I can also be booked to speak for a seminar or colloquium through JPL's Outer Planets Colloquium Series.
	TIME-VARIABILITY IN JUPITER'S ATMOSPHERE The rich history of time-domain Jupiter data is of great value because it provides a whole new angle of attack (distinct from spatial-domain imaging data or from spectral-domain data) to understand processes such as heat transport, atmospheric structure and evolution, composition, the formation of clouds and hazes, impact processes, and impactor populations. I will focus on several recent time-variable phenomena: After the color change of Oval BA, discovered by collaborator and amateur astronomer Chris Go in the Philippines, we used data from Hubble, Cassini, and Keck to make several discoveries about vortices on Jupiter. No physical properties of Oval BA can be found that changed before and after the Oval became red. This leaves open the possibility that the change is related to a hypothesized climate change, created when three large vortices merged in 1998 to form Oval BA. The deep cloud structure of anticyclones is different for small vortices and for large vortices, such as Oval BA and the Great Red Spot. The large vortices extend down to a water cloud layer, with water in supersolar abundance. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL-9) collision with Jupiter in 1994 was unique in that the impacts were predicted well in advance. In contrast, three impact events discovered in 2009 and 2010 were discovered live, or within one Jupiter rotation after the impact had taken place. In both cases, the Hubble Space Telescope had just been refitted with new cameras, and Hubble data played a major role in showing how the impact debris in Jupiter's atmosphere evolved over time. In 2008, while helping ESO's Very Large Telescope team to test its multi-conjugate adaptive optics system on a solar system target, we discovered that Jupiter's haze belt at the equator had shifted. We went through the archive of Hubble images to find that a similar shift occurred once before, in 2000. We are conducting studies to determine whether the variability is related to variability in deeper cloud density, which could help determine whether the shifted haze is a mist of fine cloud particles lofted up from below, or a frozen smog produced by solar UV rays.
	OUTER PLANET VOLATILE ABUNDANCES This talk is structured around the exploration of several intimately related questions concerning water and other volatiles in giant planets: Can we use giant planet volatile abundances to constrain how the planets formed, and also characterize the icy planetesimals that contributed to their formation? What is the cloud structure in the giant planets? What did the Galileo Probe Mass Spectrometer find out about water on Jupiter? Have remote sensing efforts measured water in the giant planets? Will remote sensing succeed in the future? Can the abundances of other volatiles indirectly tell us about water? How do volatile abundances compare among the giant planets? What do the densities of giant planet moons tell us about their origins?
	NITROGEN ON JUPITER - CLOUDS AND COSMOCHEMISTRY Three different gases condense in Jupiter's troposphere, resulting in a complex vertical distribution of clouds. Water forms the deepest of these clouds, but water clouds are usually obscured by overlying cloud layers. The layer above, probably composed of ammonium hydrosulfide, results when highly toxic ammonia and hydrogen sulfide gases react to form a solid. The chemistry of this strange cloud layer is poorly understood, partly because of the hazards of working with these gases in the laboratory. Ammonia condenses as the highest cloud layer in Jupiter's cold upper troposphere, yet the distinct spectral signatures of ammonia ice are surprisingly uncommon. Small ammonia cloud particles may be wafted upward to contribute to the thin haze that blankets the planet above the clouds. Since cloud heights, cloud thicknesses, and ammonia gas concentration are variable on Jupiter, we use them to trace dynamic processes in the atmosphere. The elements N and S (and probably O) in Jupiter's cloud-forming gases are about four times more enriched (with respect to hydrogen) than in a protosolar composition gas. Carbon and noble gases are also enriched. It is generally believed that these elements were enriched when Jupiter accumulated icy planetesimals during its formation, but planetesimals with the necessary abundance ratios have never been observed. The origin of these planetesimals (and therefore Jupiter itself) is still a mystery.