Seeing beyond the clouds: understanding weather and energy transport in substellar atmospheres

Understanding atmospheric energy transport is fundamental to all studies of giant planets. The thermal structure of atmospheres plays a pivotal role in shaping observed properties and must properly constrained to allow any meaningful characterization of alien atmospheres. Vertical mixing profoundly impacts observed gas abundances and delivers condensable species to cloud forming layers, where they can shape the spectral energy distributions of emitted flux. Clouds, chemistry, and variations in thermal structure have all been implicated in driving observed variability of substellar and giant planet atmospheres, and studying this variability has become a central theme of substellar science. Meanwhile, the spectacular data from the James Webb Space Telescope is revealing unexpected thermal structures that cannot be explained with traditional models, and require additional sources of heating, or energy transport. The research proposed here will tackles these challenges head-on. We will implement our new data-driven analysis framework for determining the key factors driving variability across the full temperature range of known giant (exo) planets by analysing all JWST timeseries datasets for substellar objects upto the end of Cycle 3. This analysis will be measure variations in cloud cover, thermal structure, chemistry and combinations thereof. We will also carry out detailed spectroscopic study of WISE1935, which appears to display the first known star-free stratospheric temperature inversion to establish if the observed high-altitude emission is driven by LTE or non-LTE processes.