Saturn's `Anomalous' South Polar HotSpot

 MAUNA KEA (February 4, 2005) Astronomers using the Keck I telescope
 in Hawaii are learning much more about a strange, thermal "hot spot"
 on Saturn that is located at the tip of the planet's south pole. In
 what the team is calling the sharpest thermal views of Saturn ever
 taken from the ground, the new set of infrared images suggest a
 warm polar vortex at Saturn's south pole -- the first to ever be
 discovered in the solar system. This warm polar cap is home to a
 distinct compact hot spot, believed to contain the highest measured
 temperatures on Saturn. A paper announcing the results appears in
 the Feb. 4th issue of "Science."

 "There is nothing like this compact warm cap in the Earth's
 atmosphere," said Dr. Glenn S. Orton, of the Jet Propulsion
 Laboratory in Pasadena and lead author of the paper describing the
 results. "Meteorologists have detected sudden warming of the pole,
 but on Earth this effect is very short-term. This phenomenon on
 Saturn is longer-lived because we've been seeing hints of it in
 our data for at least two years."

 The puzzle isn't that Saturn's south pole is warm; after all, it
 has been exposed to 15 years of continuous sunlight, having just
 reached its summer Solstice in late 2002. But both the distinct
 boundary of a warm polar vortex some 30 degrees latitude from the
 southern pole and a very hot "tip" right at the pole were completely
 unexpected. 

 "If the increased southern temperatures are solely the result of
 seasonality, then the temperature should increase gradually with
 increasing latitude, but it doesn't", added Dr. Orton. "We see that
 the temperature increases abruptly by several degrees near 70
 degrees south and again at 87 degrees south." 

 "One of the obvious questions is whether Saturn's north pole is
 anomalously cold and whether a cold polar vortex has been established
 there," added Dr. Orton. "This is a question that can only be
 answered by the Cassini's CIRS experiment in the near term, as
 this region can not be seen from Earth using ground-based instruments."

http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu/news/science/saturn/index.html
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