Ingersoll is a member of a team which will be looking for evidence of waves caused by the impacts in Jupiter's atmosphere. Using the Hubble Space Telescope at visible and near-infrared wavelengths, the team hopes to detect subtle changes in the surface clouds, especially changes creating a circular pattern around the impact point, like ripples in a pond. As a wave passes through a point in the atmosphere, the local pressure will rise and then fall, causing the temperature to cool and then warm very slightly, by about one degree Fahrenheit. In areas where gas is just on the edge of freezing, the passing wave's small pressure change should be enough to cause ice crystals to form. Ammonia droplets are the most likely to freeze out, which would create new cloud patterns of white crystals.
Ingersoll has also worked with Hiroo Kanamori, the Smits Professor of
Geophysics and director of Caltech's seismological laboratory, and Tim
Dowling at MIT, to model what kinds of waves may jostle Jupiter as a result
of this impact. One intriguing idea is that the biggest waves will be
confined to a narrow altitude range, where the pressure is about 3 to 5 bars,
and where there is a layer of gaseous water encircling the planet. (For
comparison, the sea-level air pressure on Earth is about 1 bar, and the
pressure at Jupiter's cloud tops is about 0.5 bar.) The temperature and
density of this layer should have just the right properties so that if the
wave travels too high, it will be refracted, or bent, downward. And if the
wave travels too low, it will be refracted upward. The net effect is to
create an internal wave channel, which should allow the waves to spread a
very long distance horizontally. These long-distance waves would act as a
probe of Jupiter's interior, much like seismic waves on Earth, and would
provide information about different atmospheric levels that cannot be
observed optically. Ingersoll and his colleagues hope to detect the water
cloud by these observations.