H2 vibrational temperatures in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter

The Jovian upper atmosphere has been extensively studied over the past few decades with many observations having been made. Typically, the H-2 vibrational temperatures have always been considered as kinetic temperatures in modelling efforts to date. However, recent studies have shown that this assumption is not robust and that we can expect enhanced vibrational temperatures due to overlapping lines to play an important role in the thermosphere of Jupiter. In this paper, we use a radiative transfer code to compute the total integrated H Lyman alpha dayglow intensity taking into account the overlapping with H-2 hot bands. We show that an atmosphere with H-2 vibrational temperatures equal to about 1.4 to 1.5 times kinetic reproduce the Voyager observations.