Could ocean and wind currents form on a tidally heated body

Question

The moon is similar to earth but orbits around a gas giant, the sun has ended its life cycle and so the only energy received on the moon comes from tidal interactions heating its core.

On earth and other planets (even those that are tidally locked with their sun) the air flows from areas that receive more energy and get hot to areas that receive less and are cool. In the case of the earth air flows from the equator towards the poles, but this travel is broken up due to the Coriolis effect which is why wind patterns on earth are broken up into Hadley cells and blow east and west instead of purely from the equator towards the poles. These wind currents also influence the flow of water in the oceans as well

On a moon that is only gaining heat through tidal friction, would a similar system develop?

Concerns:

On a moon being kept warm this way I imagine the surface temperature would be more or less constant everywhere, would this result in the air mostly just rising and falling in place instead of moving laterally and just not really developing anything like the trade winds or jet streams?

Or are there other larger factors that would affect this instead? I've tried searching for material online but couldn't really find anything so either an answer or a reference to read would be appreciated, I'm just not sure where I can find this kind of information.

Answer 1

Sorry I can't provide a reference but it sounds like you've got a grasp on the basics. I know I mentioned somewhere in another answer if you had a perfectly smooth planet you'd get vertical hexagonal Hadley Cells. That's precisely because of the "static convection" you're thinking about. But that's only if it's perfectly smooth. Even without rotation to provide shearing; surface "albedo" (in your case actually mostly varying specific heat capacity of the underlying material) and texture can still distort the cell shape. If you have such a large distortion that cells smear past adjacent ones you can potentially setup a linked current. Since regardless the heat in that cell will try to rise straight up barring any wind... and presto! That's exactly what you'd have with a Hadley cell sheared over the top of another one.

Basically, yes you'll have static loops, they'll have a diameter related to heat and atmospheric thickness. But they can be distorted quite easily. Enough distortion from evaporation, etc. and you will have wind. Wind and ocean currents will be coupled to some extent. Now will they be particularly strong or deep currents in either case? I have no idea, there's a lot of factors in that, but more heat says more strength. But you will have them. Just boil a pot of water for a similar look at imperfections building up: that steam billowing all over the place isn't doing most of that from the rotation of the Earth!

Even if you get your currents strong enough and lateral enough to overlap an adjacent cell though you might not get any organized currents, it might just be a big chaotic soup. Then again it might develop one, or a cycle. Hard to tell without a lot of details.

Although the momentum that water currents can build up, as compared to air's momentum, is something that would help a larger organized current to develop. So heavy liquids are a definite plus!

Answer 2

Europa orbiting Jupiter shows a lot of variation in heating and ice morphology as a result, so yes, you can see a lot of differentiation and likely ocean currents. There's no atmosphere on Europa, but if you had one, I'm sure you'd see some impact of the variations in tidal heating. There's a nice article by Mike Brown on the topic of the heat variation on Europa Here

Answer 3

Yes

As long as there is heat dispersion winds will exist therefore unless the moon is in a vacuum, it will develop winds