Summary
Explores the wild weather on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — enormous storms, lightning bigger than continents, winds faster than anything on Earth — and explains the atmospheric science behind these extreme conditions.
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All ages
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Teaching resources
Discussion questions
Discussion
- What is the Great Red Spot on Jupiter? How long has it been storming?
- Why do gas giant planets have much faster wind speeds than Earth?
- What makes gas giants different from rocky planets — in both structure and weather?
- Why do we know less about the weather inside gas giants than on their surfaces?
Quick work-a-long
Vocabulary: gas giant, storm, wind speed, atmosphere, pressure, Great Red Spot.
Try it: Compare Earth's strongest recorded wind speed to wind speeds on Neptune (~2,100 km/h). Create a bar graph of wind speeds on all eight planets. Which planet would be most difficult for a probe to survive in?