Statistics for Planetary Science
Multispectral imagery of Jupiter and Saturn provides a wealth of information about the structure of the atmospheres of these gas giants. Different spectral channels penetrate to different depths of their atmospheres and capture various compositional features. Principle component analysis has been a workhorse of Planetary Science because it can reveal latent structures not visible in the original images. We seek to generalize and extend this idea by applying other linear and non-linear techniques. Data come from the orbiters Galileo (Jupiter) and Cassini (Saturn), from the Hubble Space Telescope, and from ground based telescopes.