Longevity of Stratified Anticyclones with Thermal Dissipation and Cyclones with Viscous Dissipation and Their Relevance to Jupiter

We consider families of cyclones and anticyclones that are axisymmetric equilibria in an unbounded, uniformly rotating domain governed by the Boussinesq equations with vertical density stratifications, parameterized by the Brunt-Vaisala (BV) frequency N(z) along the central axis of the vortex, and by the BV N_∞(z) asymptotically far from the vortex. We show that the longevities of the anticyclones can be far longer than the characteristic Newton cooling of the fluid and that the longevities cyclones can be far longer than the characteristic viscous decay time. We report how the vortex lifetimes scale with the parameters of the systems and how they relate to the Jovian observations of mid-latitude anticyclones and polar cyclones.