  Motivated by the comments of Goodman (2009) on our paper concerning thermal
tides (Arras and Socrates 2009a), we have studied an idealized problem to
understand the global response of a completely fluid gas giant planet to
thermal forcing at the surface (Arras and Socrates 2009b). Our findings
disagree with the main claims in Goodman (2009). We find that significant
quadrupole moments can indeed be induced as a result of thermal forcing.
Furthermore, we find that it is possible for the orientation of the quadrupoles
to be such that the planet is torqued away from synchronous rotation. Given
these results, we believe our proposed thermal tide mechanism (Arras and
Socrates 2009a) provides a viable scenario for generating steady-state
asychronous rotation, inflated radii and possibly eccentric orbits of the hot
Jupiters.
