BIBLIOS

Document type
Journal articles

Document subtype
Full paper

Title
Global Empirical Models for Tropopause Height Determination

Participants in the publication
Pedro Mateus (Author)
Dep. Engenharia Geográfica, Geofísica e Energia
IDL
Virgílio B. Mendes (Author)
Dep. Engenharia Geográfica, Geofísica e Energia
IDL
Carlos A.L. Pires (Author)
Dep. Engenharia Geográfica, Geofísica e Energia
IDL

Summary
The calculation of the tropopause height is crucial to the investigation of fundamental interactions between the troposphere and stratosphere, playing an essential role in areas such as climatology, geodesy, geophysics, ecology, and aeronautics. Since the troposphere and stratosphere have many distinct features, it is possible to define the boundary between them using different variables, such as temperature lapse rate, potential vorticity and chemical concentrations. However, according to the chosen variable, different tropopause definitions are created, each one with some limitations. Using 41 years of European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis (ERA5) data, we examined the variability of the tropopause for the north and south hemispheres and developed two models, both based on blending the potential vorticity and thermal tropopauses. One model (based on a sigmoid function, named STH) depends only on latitude and day of the year, while the other model (based on bilinear interpolation, named BTH) requires an additional look-up table. In order to account for the different behaviors of the tropopauses in the north and south hemispheres, we estimated two sets of model coefficients (one for each hemisphere). When compared against a benchmark of estimated tropopause heights during three years of radiosonde data, we obtained an average RMSE for the differences of 0.88 km for the STH model and 0.67 km for the BTH model. A similar comparison for alternative models available in the literature shows that the new models have superior performance and represent a significant improvement in tropopause height determination. View Full-Text\\nKeywords: tropopause height; tropopause model; weather model data; geodesy; weather model data; navigation; meteorology


Institution
Instituto Dom Luiz (IDL), Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, 1749–016, Lisboa, Portugal

Where published
Remote Sensing

Publication Identifiers
ISSN - 2072-4292

Publisher
MDPI AG



Document Identifiers
DOI - https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14174303
URL - http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rs14174303

Rankings
SCIMAGO Q1 (2021) - 1283 - Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous)
Web Of Science Q1 (2021) - 5.349 - GEOSCIENCES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY - SCIE
SCOPUS Q1 (2021) - 7.4 - General Earth and Planetary Sciences