DIX Planetary Science Seminar

The structure of Io's atmosphere is controlled by competing processes, from volcanic outgassing and sublimation to radiative cooling and plasma heating. Yet the lack of an observationally derived temperature profile has left this balance unconstrained. We used four epochs of Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Band 7 (275–373 GHz) and Band 8 (385–500 GHz) SO2 spectroscopy to retrieve Io's vertical atmospheric temperature profiles. To mitigate long-standing degeneracies common in atmospheric retrievals, we performed a simultaneous multiline analysis combined with line-of-sight (LOS) disk-resolved Doppler velocity maps and a forward model that included a subbeam velocity dispersion term. This modeling approach enabled the separation of thermal and dynamical line-shape contributions. On the leading hemisphere, we retrieved a cold, quasi-isothermal lower atmosphere (∼124–137 K up to ∼0.5 nbar), followed by a thermospheric rise reaching hundreds of kelvins by ∼10−2 nbar. On the trailing hemisphere, our fits yielded qualitatively similar profiles but consistently retrieved lower SO2 column densities. The lower column densities confined line formation to the first few kilometers, making the trailing hemisphere spectra statistically consistent with an isothermal atmosphere. Across datasets, we retrieved fractional gas coverages of ∼35%–50% and subbeam velocity dispersions of ∼25–85 m s−1, encoding LOS velocity dispersion within a beam element in excess of the disk-resolved Doppler velocity map. Together, these retrievals deliver the first vertically resolved temperature profiles of Io's atmosphere, reveal robust vertical structure on the dayside leading hemisphere, and offer new constraints on Io's thermal energy balance.