A new addition to the thermospheric energy equation is the inclusion of H3+ cooling, a process known to be important on Jupiter (Miller et al., 2006, 2010). At thermospheric temperatures typically found on Saturn (320–500 K, Nagy et al., 2009), we do not expect H3+ cooling to play an important role, but we included the process to be able to assess its importance for cases where polar magnetospheric heating raises temperatures above ∼500 K. We implemented globally the H3+ cooling rates of Miller et al. (2010) in the form of a parameterisation as a function of local thermospheric temperature and H3+ density.
Saturn
thermospheric temperatures
320–500 K
K
Saturn
temperatures
above ∼500 K
K