Vorticity can be thought of as the tendency of a paddlewheel to spin if placed in the flow. High vorticity is a large counter-clockwise spin, zero vorticity is no spin, and a large negative vorticity is a tendency to spin clockwise. The climate models of short-period extrasolar planets that Jonathan Langton and I have developed show a remarkable variety of vorticity patterns on their surfaces, in keeping with the incredibly stormy and complex nature of their atmospheres. Here’s a gallery of Mercator-projection vorticity maps for the known strongly irradiated Jovian planets that have significant eccentricities. The red arrows indicate the wind speeds and directions across the planetary surfaces. These figures are all from a paper that’s currently under review at the Astrophysical Journal (see here for an overview of the numerical method that we’re using). Also, a shout-out is due to Edward Tufte for advocating the strong graphic-design effect of small spots of saturated color on a gray-scaled backdrop.
It’s interesting to compare the vorticity maps with the temperature distributions on the planetary surfaces (shown in the same order as above):