Robert sent in a couple of links worth posting. I’ll be brief but the impetus came from reading https://phys.org/news/2025-10-extreme-jet-streams-giant-planets.html … which is a modeling study. He asks, does modeling reflect reality and does an explanation otherwise exist that might be an alternative way of looking at these jets. Both Earth and Neptune have a magnetic south pole located in their northern hemisphere. Uranus is somewhat more complicated due to the angle of the planet’s rotation with respect to the plane of its orbit – but we can include Uranus in this category also.
Jupiter and Saturn both have a magnetic north pole located in their northern hemispheres, the opposite of the three planets previously mentioned. Jupiter and Saturn display an eastward flowing belt at their equators, for Earth, Uranus and Neptune the opposite is true. The direction of rotation of equatorial wind belts is dependant upon a planet’s magnetic field orienttion. This can be seen from the work of Michael Csuzdi – see https://web.archive.org/web/20180805181047/https://breakthroughinenergy.com/ …
To get an idea of how wind belts on the outer planets form the way they do see: ‘cyclones and anticyclones’ which can be found here -at https://web.archive.org/web/20190308090320/https://breathroughinenergy.com/index.php? … Robert suggests that all planetary wind belts result from electrical interactions between the planet and its environment, namely its magnetosphere and its heliosphere. The unifying force is electromagnetism. For example, if we should picture planets as having electromagnetic hemispheres then the puzzle of Jupiter’s great red spot, which astronomers suggest is an anti-cyclone, disappears in Jupiter’s southern magnetic hemisphere – and then the great red spot is actually a cyclone.