Water clouds on Jupiter

This false-color picture of a convective thunderstorm 10.000 Km(6.218 miles) northwest of Jupiter's Great Red Spot was obtained by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on June 26, 1996. The white cloud in the center is a tall, thick cloud about 1.000 Km (620 miles) across, standing 25 Km (15 miles) higher than most of the surrounding clouds. Its base extends off to the left and appears red in this representation. This red color indicates that the cloud base is very deep in the atmosphere, about 50 Km (30 miles) below the surrounding clouds. Most of the wisps and features in Jupiter's clouds are thick and thin ammonia clouds, forming at a pressure just less than Earth's sea level pressure. On Jupiter, water is the only substance to form a cloud at a depth where the pressure is about 5 times the Earth's sea level pressure. The red base of this thunderstorm is so deep that it can only be a water cloud. In 1979 NASA's Voyager spacecraft saw convective clouds of this type near the Great Red Spot. They erupted like this roughly once every 10 days and lasted a few days each. But Voyager's cameras could not allow the determination of the storms' altitude. It is thought that this storm is analogous to an Earth thunderstorm, with the cloud's high, bright, white portion comparable to the familiar anvil cloud on Earth. Whether any rain or snow is falling below this cloud is unknown, but there are indications that similar storms on Jupiter have lightning in them.