concept

Superrotation

The phenomenon in which a world's whole atmosphere spins markedly faster than the solid surface beneath it - sometimes dozens of times faster. It shows up on slow-rotating bodies with thick atmospheres, like Venus and Titan, where atmospheric waves and thermal tides keep pumping momentum into the flow. It is the dynamical regime a slow-spinning, dense-aired world like Pandora can drift toward, with the consequence that heat gets spread evenly around the globe.