Abstract
Abstract. Temperature sounding of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and lower troposphere exhibits multilayered temperature inversions specially in high latitudes during extreme winters. These temperature inversion layers are originated based on the combined forcing of local- and large-scale synoptic meteorology. At the local scale, the thermal inversion layer forms near the surface and plays a central role in controlling the surface radiative cooling and air pollution dispersion; however, depending upon the large-scale synoptic meteorological forcing, an upper level thermal inversion can also exist topping the local ABL. In this article a numerical methodology is reported to determine thermal inversion layers present in a given temperature profile and deduce some of their thermodynamic properties. The algorithm extracts from the temperature profile the most important temperature variations defining thermal inversion layers. This is accomplished by a linear interpolation function of variable length that minimizes an error function. The algorithm functionality is demonstrated on actual radiosonde profiles to deduce the multilayered temperature inversion structure with an error fraction set independently.
Highlights
The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is the lowest part of the troposphere in permanent contact with the earth surface and responds to thermal and roughness surface forcing in timescales of minutes to hours (Stull, 1988)
The ABL timescale for surface response ranges from minutes to hours (Garrat and Brost, 1981; Stull, 1988), the ABL response to synoptic forcing at local scale initiated by the radiative and dynamic interaction in the presence of the elevated inversion (EI) can vary from hours to several days depending on a number of factors related to topographic conditions, temperature and wind distribution, thermal stratification and synoptic air mass type
Since the ability of the algorithm to extract thermal inversion layers depends upon the value chosen for ε, it is reasonable to determine for example what threshold value of temperature profile gradient dT /dz in ◦C/100 m can be retrieved when a given value of ε is preset
Summary
Discuss.: 16 October 2014 Revised: 7 April 2015 – Accepted: 8 April 2015 – Published: 11 May 2015
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