THE weather on Saturn can change dramatically. A new report suggests equatorial windspeeds there have dropped by more than 40 per cent since 1980.
Agustin Sánchez-Lavega of Pa’s Vasco University in Bilbao, Spain, and his colleagues have compared cloud features and storm systems on Saturn in Hubble images taken between 1996 and 2002 with conditions on the planet in the early 1980s when the Voyager spacecraft flew past the planet. They found that over the past two decades, the speeds of Saturn’s equatorial jet winds have dropped from a fearsome 1700 kilometres per hour to 1000 kilometres per hour (Nature, vol 423, p 623).…
