Seasonal Variation of Saturn's Lyα Brightness

Abstract

We examine Saturn’s nonauroral (dayglow) emissions at Ly α observed by the Cassini/Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument from 2003 until 2017, to constrain meridional and seasonal trends in the upper atmosphere. We separate viewing geometry effects from trends driven by atmospheric properties, by applying a multivariate regression to the observed emissions. The Ly α dayglow brightnesses depend on the incident solar flux, solar incidence angle, emission angle, and observed latitude. The emissions across latitudes and seasons show a strong dependence with solar incidence angle, typical of resonantly scattered solar flux and consistent with no internal source such as electroglow. We observe a bulge in Ly α brightnesses that shifts with the summer season from the southern to the northern hemisphere. We estimate atomic hydrogen optical depths above the methane homopause level for dayside disk observations (2004–2016) by comparing observed Ly α emissions to a radiative transfer model. We model emissions from resonantly scattered solar flux and a smaller but significant contribution by scattered photons from the interplanetary hydrogen (IPH) background. During the northern summer, inferred hydrogen optical depths steeply decrease with latitude toward the winter hemisphere from a northern hemisphere bulge, as predicted by a 2D seasonal photochemical model. The southern hemisphere mirrors this trend during its summer. However, inferred optical depths show substantially more temporal variation between 2004 and 2016 than predicted by the photochemical model. We benchmark our brightness values by comparing observed IPH Ly α emissions from Cassini/UVIS in 2006 with a model of the IPH emissions. Cassini/UVIS observations agree well with the modeled IPH background.

Keywords

• Planetary atmospheres
• Ultraviolet astronomy
• Upper atmosphere
• Atmospheric variability
• Saturn