Saturn Storm Advisory

What first showed up as a small blemish on the face of Saturn about a year ago turned into a rager of a storm that has wrapped around the entire planet, covering around 1.5 billion square miles.

The storm, sometimes called the "Dragon Storm", marches through the planet's atmosphere and is recorded through a series of false-color mosaics from NASA's Cassini Spacecraft. The red and orange colors which show up in the Cassini images indicate clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Yellow and green colors indicate intermediate clouds. White and blue indicate high clouds and haze. The rings of Saturn appear as a thin horizontal line of bright blue. Casini has been following the 9,000 mile wide storm as it moves across Saturn's surface, snapping some spectacular photos along the way.

This "Dragon Storm" is about 500 times larger than the biggest storm previously seen by Cassini. At its most intense the Dragon generated lightning flashes more than 10 times per second.

"Cassini shows us that Saturn is bipolar," says Casini team member Andrew Ingersoll. "Saturn is not like Earth and Jupiter, where storms are fairly frequent. Weather on Saturn appears to hum along placidly for years and then erupt violently." Evidently storms on Saturn are less like a weather events and more like a volcanoes. Before the storm erupts there is a build up of pressure under its placid exterior.

This event was a single thunderstorm that raged continuously for more than 200 days, affecting nearly 20 percent of Saturn's northern hemisphere. While the storm's active phase is over some of the clouds it created still linger in the planet's atmosphere today.