It’s easy to think of Jupiter when we see storms like the one I have here, but Saturn also has such storms.

A storm on Saturn. Click for a little larger version. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This image is black and white, had it been in color the colors would be muted in comparison to Jupiter owing to the fact that Saturn is farther from the sun and the bands are less chemically complex.

Still Saturn has belts and zones just like Jupiter and don’t be fooled the winds of the upper atmosphere are fast, very fast at around 1,800 km/hr…that’s 1,100 + miles per hour! We don’t see as many really big cyclonic storms on Saturn and they don’t live as long.

Just like Jupiter, the gravitational contraction heats up the interior of the planet and helps power the storms. Yeah, real pressure, in the order of 4-million atmospheres, and the pressure is so intense the interior is thought to be liquid hydrogen with a core of rock and ice about 1.5 times the size of our Earth.

Next time you see a picture of Saturn and Jupiter side by side, notice that Saturn is flattened more at the poles, this is because of the low density of the planet and the rapid rotation. Oh sure, Jupiter also shows flattening, but not so much.

And yes Saturn would float in water because its density is 0.7 g/cc and water is generally regarded to be 1.0 g/cc.

About the image from the Cassini site:

This view looks toward a region centered at 24 degrees south of the planet’s equator.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 6, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.