Do stable atmospheric layers exist?

Abstract

The notion of stable atmospheric layers is a classical idealization used for understanding atmospheric dynamics and thermodynamics. Using state of the art drop sonde data and using conditional, dynamical and convective stability criteria we show that apparently stable layers are typically composed of a hierarchy of unstable layers themselves with embedded stable sublayers, and unstable sub‐sub layers etc. i.e. in a Russian Matryoshka doll‐like fractal hierarchy. We therefore argue that the notion of stable atmospheric layers is untenable and must be replaced by modern scaling notions.