What is the term for Venus's atmosphere rotating faster than its surface?

The term for Venus’s atmosphere rotating faster than its surface is super-rotation.

Venus’s upper atmosphere circles the planet in roughly four Earth days, while the solid planet takes about 243 Earth days to complete one sidereal rotation. This extraordinary difference means the cloud deck can race around Venus dozens of times faster than the surface beneath it.

The strongest winds occur near the cloud tops, approximately 60–70 kilometers above the ground, where speeds can approach 100 m/s, or about 360 km/h. Closer to the surface, the dense atmosphere moves much more slowly. The super-rotation is therefore an atmospheric circulation phenomenon, not evidence that Venus’s rocky body is spinning rapidly.

Hadley circulation helps describe the large-scale overturning of heated air, while the Coriolis effect influences atmospheric motion; neither term is the specific name for the faster-than-surface rotation. Scientists study thermal tides, planetary-scale waves, and momentum transport to explain how Venus maintains this remarkable circulation.