Several experiments on board the European mission Venus Express (VEx) – part of the VEx payload is the SPICAV instrument developed at LATMOS – have reported detection of waves in the Venus atmosphere both as oscillations on the temperature field and as patterns on the cloud layer. A recent study carried out by an international team led by Arianna Piccialli, a postdoctoral research fellow at LATMOS, has analyzed waves seen at the cloud tops on the Northern hemisphere of Venus in images taken by the Visible Monitoring Camera (VMC/VEx) and has confirmed the presence of waves at high latitudes concentrated above Ishtar Terra, a continental size highland that includes the highest mountain belts of the planet.

Wave trains on Venus. Credit: ESA/Venus Express/VMC/A. Piccialli et al., 2014.

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Link ESA: http://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=53597