Title:
	Titan's Methane Weather
Author(s):
	Henry Roe (Lowell Observatory)
	Emily Schaller (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii)
	Michael Brown (Caltech)
	Chadwick Trujillo (Gemini Observatory
Abstract:

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, stands out in our solar system as the
sole moon with a substantial atmosphere. Conditions in Titan's
troposphere are near the triple point of methane, the second most
abundant component of its atmosphere. Much of the interesting weather
phenomena on Earth occur because conditions are near the triple point
of water. Our understanding of Titan has shifted considerably in the
past 10-15 years. While once we thought of Titan's troposphere as a
quiescent place, lacking in clouds or localized weather and only
changing subtly on long seasonal timescales, we now understand the
troposphere to be a dynamic system with significant weather events
regularly occurring on top of the backdrop of dramatic seasonal
changes. Much of this new understanding of Titan comes from Gemini
adaptive optics observations. The dense temporal coverage of
groundbased observations has been important to teasing out statistical
trends in cloud activity. Although the observational record of Titan's
weather covers only roughly a third of its 30-year seasonal cycle,
Titan's atmospheric processes appear to be more closely analogous to
those of Earth than any other object in our solar system. In our talk
we will discuss our current understanding of Titan's methane weather
and the critical role that adaptive optics observations on Gemini
North have played in developing that understanding.  In a companion
poster we will present the entirety of the dataset acquired with
Gemini North over the past several years.